LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

©iHP'-i'-'t-^itW'iS^ |o 

Shelf ....GtiJ? 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



RAMBLES OVERLAND. 



Rambles Overland, 



A TRIP ACROSS THE CONTINENT. 



/ 



ALMOlSr GUNNISON. 



What thy soul holds dear, imagine it 

To LIE that way thou go' ST. 

Shaespeabe. 



// 




BOSTON: 
UNIVERSALIST PUBLISHING HOUSE. 

1884. 



Copyright, 1883, 
By Universalist Publishing House. 






Sanifaergtfjj i^ress t 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



PREFACE. 



And so I penned 
It down, until at last it came to be, 
For length and breadth, the bigness which you see, 

BUNYAN. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I. 

Page 

Westward Ho ! ^^ 



CHAPTER II. 
The Yellowstone Park 29 

CHAPTER III. 
Saunterings in Wonder-Land 47 

CHAPTER IV. 
A Fifty-Mile Walk 65 

CHAPTER V. 
Over the Rockies by Stage 85 

CHAPTER VI. 
On the Pacific Slope 99 



8 CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER VII. 

Page 

The City of the Golden Gate 109 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Approach to the Yosemite 127 

CHAPTER IX. 
The Yosemite 139 

CHAPTER X. 
The Orange-Land op California 159 

CHAPTER XI. 
Across the Desert 181 

CHAPTER XII. 
A Mexican Detour 191 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Colorado Days 211 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Incidents of Travel 229 



WESTWARD HO! 



Go West, young man ! 

Horace Greeley. 



RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

CHAPTER I. 

WESTWARD HO! 

"TTTHEX Madame de Sevigne rapturously ex- 
^ ' claimed, " a journey to make, and Paris at 
the end of it 1 " she must have had the same emotions 
with which at midnight we commence our trip across 
the continent to the Golden Gate. 

The Great Northern Eailway approaches comple- 
tion, and over the unfinished gap we shall make pas- 
sage of the Eockies in a stage. The pictures of 
Moran have made us impatient to see the wonders 
of the Yellowstone ; thence we will go southward on 
the Pacific, enter the Golden Gate, and come home- 
ward by the Southern desert, with sight of orange 
groves and Mexico upon the way. 

Our little party consists of four. A Dramatic 
Critic of the city press, with a clever knack at 
sketching and a kind of universal knowledge, picked 
up in his Bohemian wanderings up and down the 



12 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

earth ; " the Eeporter," not long from college, sent out 
with the benedictions of his paper, " to write the coun- 
try up," — a youth of most susceptible proclivities, 
and withal a kind of pushing enterprise tliat might 
by a less fastidious historian be accounted " cheek." 
A geological Professor and the writer complete the 
group. The Professor is a man not over old in years, 
nor always so sedate in manner as the world outside 
our camping-tent surmises, but skilled in lore of 
rocks and flowers, a much-travelled man, and, despite 
his business, not yet petrified into a " fossil," although 
the irreverent youngsters of the party early christen 
him " Old Silurian." At "Washington we rendezvous. 
We push onward by the " Scenic Eoute," as it is ad- 
vertised upon the bills ; riding upon the platform in 
the exhilaration of our new-found freedom, taking 
note of the fair landscapes that lie along the roadway 
to the mountains, the canal-boat moving slowly on 
near the track, the captain sitting in the sun astride 
the tiller, while his wife beside the mule tugs on 
ahead. 

At Harper's Ferry the iron horse makes pause to 
drink, and we see the engine-house held in the ante- 
bellum days by old John Brown. It has no historic 
look, for it is used as the showman's bulletin, and 
bears upon its front the portrait of the tattooed man, 
who is numbered among the wonders of " the greatest 
show on earth." 



WESTWAKD HO ! 13 

We have good fortune in the time of our passage 
throucrh the heart of the Alles^hanies, for the sun is 
four hours high when, at the mountain's base, the 
other engine is hitched on, and the great lumbering 
train slowly begins the long ascent. We have sent 
a telegram ahead to the division superintendent for 
leave to ride upon the engine, and so we make the 
passage in the engine's cab, half-blinded with the 
smoke and suffocated with the simmerincj oil. The 
view from our lofty perch is a royal one as the train 
moves up : great sweeps of valleys, sunlit peaks 
above, villages in cosiest nooks below, and ragged 
cliffs beside the track. The great engines pull heavily 
with panting breath, the engineer holding hand upon 
the lever, his long beard tied together with a cotton 
string ; so with wonder all alert we come skyward to 
the summit, and with exultant speed go down into 
the valley. Just when the sunset of the second day 
is touching the waters of the lal^e we reach Chicago. 
How wonderful it is ! What powers of expansion, 
what recuperative force, what magic has changed the 
prairie to a city, what bustle in the life of its 
crowded streets ! There are young faces everywhere 
in places of authority ; in bank and office, store and 
court, young men are in charge, and the world goes 
on despite their youth. Hotels, churches, public 
buildings, and business places give evidence of 
wealth, and though there is a little touch of the 



14 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

ostentation that suddenly acquired wealth affects, yet 
there is such tremendous energy of life in this bump- 
tious city of the lake, that the casual visitor is not 
surprised that all the natives feel kinship with the 
Apostle Paul, in that, with him, they are " citizens of 
no mean city." The traces of the fire are nearly 
gone, and so out of ashes has beauty come, that, imi- 
tating Eome, which gave honored place to the image 
of the wolf that suckled the founders of the city, we 
would suggest — if it be permitted for the greater city 
to imitate the lesser one — that Mrs. O'Leary's cow 
be made Chicago's tutelary deity, held in honor for 
her works' sake, the worship finding precedent in 
the honors paid in Bible times to a certain golden 
calf. 

On to the Northwest, crossing the Mississippi into 
the rival cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, we hasten. 
Fourteen years ago we came hither from far below 
upon one of the palace steamers of the river. We 
do not find the levee now where it run itself aground 
for anchorage, nor is the little ferry across the stream, 
nor is the long ride by Port Snelling and the Falls of 
Minnehaha as solitary as it used to be. 

The cities have grown mightily, with streets of 
metropolitan dimensions, stores, houses, institutions, 
everything that great cities in the older States ac- 
quire in centuries. Unless the outlook is deceptive, 
here is to be the emporium of the great Northwest. 



WESTWARD HO ! 15 

The cities will grow together and become the dis- 
tributing centre for this vast empire lying between 
the lake and the seas. 

In the printer's fonts from which this book is 
made there are few figures among the types, and we 
have no design to make it a guide-book of our jour- 
ney, nor to garnish its pages by statistics of products 
or population. It is enough to say that these com- 
bined cities, whose site thirty years ago was nameless, 
have now a population of one hundred and sixty thou- 
sand, with many railroads, great mills of every kind, 
and a business and social life having scant trace of 
pioneer days and ways. There are surprising beauties 
in the outskirts of the cities, in fair lakes set round 
with winding roads overgrown with trees and vines, 
and some historic spots whose natural beauties have 
received the new enchantments that legend and po- 
etry give. 

Westward now, straight as the arrow flies, with 
hardly shadow of a turning till we cross the bar at 
the mouth of the Columbia, we are started on our 
two thousand mile railway ride ! 

The cars are neat and all the appointments ele- 
gant, and with the dining cars by day and the Pul- 
man sleepers for the night, we need not make our 
pilgrimage a penance. 

The country through Western Minnesota is half 
familiar, for it is a land of lakes and forests such 



16 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

as we have seen at home. At Brainerd there is ex- 
citement, for a local worthy, one Jack O'Neill, is 
dead, and " the boys " are giving him the honor of 
the best funeral the town affords. His life has not 
been one of unmixed virtue, for he died possessed of 
a dance-house and two saloons, was " lively with his 
gun," and not one but many times had " killed his 
man." But memories are short in the presence of 
the dead, and the Brainerd boys cannot miss the 
opportunity of improving the occasion. The pro- 
cession is in progress as the train comes in ; the mu- 
nicipal police, three in number, with silver stars and 
locust clubs, all the coaches that the town affords are 
here, with a motley following of wagons of varied 
kinds, and a showy hearse attended by a band. So 
the ex-saloonist is being gathered to his fathers. 

In the early morning we cross the Eed Eiver and 
are in the Territory of Dakota. How wonderful it 
is in its illimitable magnitude ! For three hundred 
miles due west we shall journey on its soil, and see in 
these pioneer homes the beginning of the splendid 
empire that is to be. 

N"o richer soil lies out-doors than this of the Eed 
Eiver valley, and the subsequent journey across the 
continent shows no land so rich. The river is a 
sluggish creek, but it is navigable for the rude stern- 
wheelers northward for many miles. There is but 
little poetry of pleasant winding paths along its banks. 



WESTWARD HO ! 17 

for they are bare of trees except scattered cotton- 
woods. Fargo is a thriving city of ten thousand 
people, with electric lights and all the things that 
make a city in these modern times. The great bonan- 
za farms are here, and it was these that gave impetus 
to Fargo. We pass the Dalrymple farm, with its 
great stacks and wide-extended buildings. The farm 
is estimated to contain seventy-five thousand acres, 
and the profits in 1882 from the twenty-seven 
thousand acres under cultivation were upwards of 
two hundred thousand dollars. Large towns are left 
behind ; stations now are hardly more than stopping- 
places ; here and there a solitary pre-emptor's cabin 
rises on these billowy plains, and about it are little 
signs of life, — 

" The first low wash of waves, where soon 
Shall roll the human sea." 

There is a strange fascination in these unfenced 
plains ; the sky makes such perfect circle of the hori- 
zon as one observes at sea ; far backward even to the 
sky, forward too into the sky beyond, the iron path 
trails on its limitless length without a break ; little 
huttes or hills dot the landscape, and narrow streams 
fringed with the cotton-wood, which of all the trees is 
the only one loyal to the plains. The fields are not 
absolutely level, but swelling in gentle undulations, 
with such variety of outline that one travels across 

2 



18 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

Dakota without weariness of seeing, every sense held 
captive by the fascination of 

*' These gardens of the desert, 
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, 
For which the speech of England has no name, — 
The prairies." 

The land grows bare as we move westward from 
the Eed Eiver, though nowhere do we find it poor, 
according to our ISTew England standard; the crops 
give only partial promise. The passengers are few, 
made up of tourists, — not many going across the con- 
tinent, the forward car being filled with emigrants 
seeking homes. 

At Bismarck, four hundred and twenty miles from 
St. Paul, we find the newly selected site of the capital 
of the Territory. It is a city, as things go here, but 
has failed to catch the boom it has desired, until now, 
selected as the place of legislation, the thrifty citizens 
wait for the coming of the expected multitudes. It 
has a population of three thousand five hundred, but 
is limitless in expectations. In the Land Office that 
we visit, the city that is to be is marked upon the 
map with metropolitan dimensions, with squares and 
parks, great blocks, and avenues leading into space. 
The stores are large in superficial surface on the 
street, but apt to disappoint behind the wide-extended 
fronts; and these frail houses which, covered with no 



WESTWARD HO ! 19 

hypocrisy of paint, so show the grain of the native 
pine can hardly give much comfort when the bliz- 
zards come. 

We have no thought of purchase here, for we are 
no incognito millionnaires ; but upon the sidewalk a 
seedy-looking, landless native spies us, and comes up 
with friendly warning against the land-sharks of the 
place. To soften his revilings we mildly ask, "Is 
not the land here good ? " when he turns upon us 
with such contempt as the " tender-foot " merits from 
the natives, and contemptuously answers, " Good ! 
why, man, it won't make mud ! " The Missouri Eiver 
is a mile beyond, spanned by a million-dollar bridge. 
The river is simply a vast mud-puddle in motion, 
with great flats and meadows covered with marshy 
grass sifted full of sand; the shores are bluffy, but 
unattractive ; and the voyage to Fort Benton, a thou- 
sand miles beyond, on these rude steamers here, does 
not form an outlook sufficiently alluring to make us 
tarry for the long detour. 

Fort Lincoln is close in sight upon the bluff, with 
many associations of recent Indian wars and the brave 
Custer, who was stationed here. The rival city, Man- 
dan, is on the river's western side, — hardly in sight 
of it, but far enough away to miss the risings of the 
current in the days of freshet. It has a depot in the 
Queen Anne style, and such a hotel as we have no- 
where found since w^e left the "Nicolett" at Minne- 



20 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

apolis. A little park is beside the track, and the 
repair-shops of the road are here. It has the favor 
of the railway, and on this is built the expectations 
of the future. The city is between two rivers, for the 
Heart is just beyond ; it is a county seat, and its 
population has doubled in the year. In 1879 the 
Indians had encampment here, the Sioux and Arick- 
arees having then a pitched battle. It is only a two- 
year-old town, but has a public hall, a lyceum course, 
and the inevitable brace of rival papers. The main 
street is lined with stores, and only with difficulty — 
because of the swarming crow^ds — can we find pas- 
sage on the sidewalks. The land slopes up to a high 
bluff", on which, in vision, doubtless every merchant 
now can see the shapely house he will inhabit when 
the millennium that is coming is fully come. 

Mandan has peculiarly interesting prehistoric relics. 
An old cemetery has been found near by, containing 
the bones of a giant race ; mounds filled with' stone 
weapons, arrow heads, rude pottery, vases of flints 
and agates. The pottery is delicately finished, and 
decorated with much artistic skill. The mounds are 
not simply the treasure-chests of a vanished race, but 
catacombs of the dead. Skeletons of men and horses 
rest here in shrouds of ashes; and though the Indians 
have tenacious memories, and preserve traditions of 
the dead for ages, yet they have no legends coming 
down from older tribes of this race buried here, and 



WESTWARD HO ! 21 

they call these " spirit mounds," filled with relics of 
a shadowy people. 

We may be pardoned if we linger here at Mandan 
longer than is our custom in our westward flight, for 
why should not our heart be where our treasure is ? 
Yes, we are owners of Mandan soil! This is the 
fashion in which it happens : We are writing in the 
office of the ''Inter-Ocean;" the Professor paces 
close beside us, impatient for his bed. A young 
man enters and claims acquaintance with him on 
the ground that he once slept beneath his teachings 
in the class-room. The young man has a land office 
in the town, and as it is yet some short of midnight, 
and we are to leave upon the morning train, he invites 
him down to see the good fortune he has acquired. 

In an hour's time a messenger comes back with 
summons from the Professor, and in an office with 
great maps spread over his extended knees we find 
him seriously meditating a purchase in the town. 
The Professor is a man mature in years ; not greatly 
given to foolish speculation, nor so affluent in purse 
that he can greatly hinder the advent of actual set- 
tlers by his speculative dissipations. We try beneath 
the map to nudge him into caution, making pleasantly 
satirical remarks about buying city lots in a town 
scarce weaned as yet ; but the Professor has the mania 
on, and feeling that it would be a shabby thing to 
desert a friend, we buy the lots adjoining those se- 



22 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

lected by the learned pundit, that we may throw our 
tomato-cans over the Professor's fence, and also ab- 
sorb such wisdom as comes from close proximity to 
the home where a wise man lives. 

We put the agent on his honor, and are assured — 
for he seems to be an honest man — that in a year, at 
least, the lots will double ; and though we offer then 
and there to sell them back for just a third above the 
cost, and save the trouble of a deed, yet his refusal 
does not shake our faith, and our Mandan lots, haK 
through the summer, by reason of the profit they will 
bring, give reason for every folly that depletes the 
hoard hidden in our inner pocket for the trip. We 
walk out in the moonlight to see the purchase we 
have made : we find the place where the boulevard 
will be on which our lots face so pleasantly upon the 
map, and though the bluff on which they rest is some- 
what distant, and there is no sign of habitation with- 
in a mile at least, and though the city seems to be 
growing east instead of west, yet we have somewhere 
heard that every city at last grows on its westward 
side, and that the star of empire westward goes in 
the direction of our lots. So we find comfort, in the 
moonlight, looking at our land, though, to be fair and 
square, we have no other hint of where it is, beyond 
the general fact that it is somewhere between the track 
and the Canadian line. 

Six hundred miles or more from St. Paul, and 



WESTWARD HO ! 23 

we roll off the prairie into the " Bad Lands, " 
which extend on either side of the Little Missouri 
Eiver through a belt of forty miles. It is a region 
of desolation, softened by spots of tender beauty. 
Great huttcs of clay seamed with gulches, fields 
compared with which the dreariest desert is beauti- 
ful ; bluffs scarred with such washings as the storms 
may give ; vast amphitheatre-like spaces ; the broken, 
colorless soil walled around with hills carved into 
such fantastic sculpturings as a race of giant goblins 
might fashion. 

There are wondrous colors here : great luttes gir- 
dled with yellow bands, and bright vermilion patches 
set against the neutral tints of this weird, spectral 
land. The very grass is wiry, as though made of 
steel, covering the fields which have softened into 
vegetation with such decoration as the frost rime 
makes upon a winter's day. On horseback from the 
Little Missouri station we ride out over these Bad 
Lands, and look down into such depths of desolation 
as we have never seen before : scoriae, petrified wood, 
and fossil leaves are everywhere ; mountains of lignite 
burning in perpetual flames, the great seams sulphur- 
crested ; everywhere fantastic peaks, monuments set 
in goblin petrifactions, — such is this "Pyramid 
Park," as yet almost unknown here in Dakota. The 
Professor tells us that this region was once the bed 
of a great lake, out of whose richness grew luxuriant 



24 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

vegetation. This passed away, and, pressed by suc- 
ceeding growths, transformed itself into vast beds of 
lignite coal, which, being without cementing ingre- 
dients, remained soft, and easily was washed by rains. 
The wear and wash of the varied strata under the 
action of rain and frost were very great. Hence 
" the little watercourses have curiously furrowed 
and corrugated sides," while the burning coal fuses 
the over and under lying beds, leaving the richly 
colored slag, and, as the veins burn out, great pits of 
desolation where the earth has sunk. 

The day of our explorations is well suited to this 
sombre weirdness of landscape, for although it is in 
midsummer, the cold hail falls, and the wind, whist- 
ling around the huttcs, chills us to the marrow. Our 
stopping-place is in an abandoned fort, converted, now 
that the soldiers have moved on, into a tourist's inn. 
It is the centre of a great stock-raising enterprise re- 
cently set on foot by the Marquis de Mores, a retired 
officer, now under temporary cloud in tlie Mandan jail 
because of his killing one Eiley Luffcey, a local citi- 
zen. The young parson, who preaches in the old mess- 
room on the Sabbath evening that overtakes us here, 
conducted the burial service. He tells us that in the 
annals of the settlement no man has died as yet out- 
side his boots, which fact does not greatly cheer us, as 
in the old fort we close our eyes to sleep. 

The Montana boundary line is passed, a pair of 



WESTWARD HO ! 25 

antlers nailed upon a pole marking the place, and 
reaching soon the Yellowstone, for upwards of three 
hundred miles we pass up its pleasant valley. The 
stream has large proportions, and carries its clear 
waters over a stony bed ; the mountains which flank 
the Eockies bring their snowy crests in view ; little 
camps of strolling Indians have their colored tepees 
beside the track ; the cowboy from the cattle-ranges 
becomes a familiar sight ; the country now has legends 
of recent Indian battles ; and through thriving towns, 
in sight of fairer mountains, we come to Bozeman, 
where we shall leave for a time our westward course, 
that we may view the wonders of the great Yellow- 
stone Park. 

On the omnibus which bears us to the village, a 
quarter of a mile away, we see in the driver one whom 
we used to know as a thriving merchant in the Empire 
State, while on the steps an undergraduate of Yale, 
as he stretches out his hand for fare, answ^ers our 
remonstrance with the significant remark, " I know, 
gentlemen, it is something of a swindle to ask fifty 
cents for a five-cent ride, but it is the custom of the 
country," and — we find it is. 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 



This masquerade 
Of shape and color ^ light and shade. 

Whittieb. 



CHAPTEE II. 

THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 

AT ten o'clock on a perfect summer day we turn 
our leaders' heads southward from the town 
of Bozeman for our long journey through the Yel- 
lowstone Park. Only yesterday we reached the 
town, and since then an outfit has been hired, stores 
and camping equipage procured, and the expedition 
fitted out. Our conveyance is a Studebaker wagon 
with three good seats, a canvas top, with wooden 
axles for the wheels, and heavy brake for the steep 
pitches of the hills. Two heavy horses are at the 
pole, while two lighter ones, fit for saddle purposes, 
serve as leaders. We have provisioned heavily, for 
we shall find no stores along the way, carrying also 
forage for the horses, with tent and all conveniences 
for half a month of roughing it. Our driver is a 
genius in his way, " Toot " by name, although not 
christened by it, if ever he was christened. His 
name adorns no calendar of saints, although not 
half those ancient worthies had such nimble-witted 
tongue, nor hand so deft in all the arts of life in 
wonder-land. He swears at times with most provok- 



30 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

icg volubility ; but his oaths are not the common sort, 
and Toot has lived for half his life upon the plains. 
He draws the long bow sometimes in the strange 
tales he tells us ; but then he assures us he is not like 
other drivers in the Park, for when he tells the truth 
he is not ashamed to own it. In vain we try to put 
our jokes upon him ; always he retorts to our dis- 
comfiture, and a more thoughtful, generous-hearted, 
rough-and-ready fellow never put foot upon a brake. 
He seems to like us, too, although w^e notice with just 
a touch of sadness that while he calls us pilgrims 
without one hint of bitterness, yet when he wishes 
to put the climax on the list of nouns with which he 
curses the stumbling nigh-side wheeler, he always 
adds, as the final curse, the word " pilgrim," which 
thing we do not like. His brother " Al " is with us, 
too, somewhat jaded, he tells us, with over-conviviality 
behind the bar of the saloon he keeps in Bozeman, 
going with us on the trip to try and taper off, al- 
though, to tell the truth, in two good weeks of obser- 
vation we cannot see where the tapering comes in. 
He is, however, a ready-handed fellow, with native 
shrewdness much sharpened by an adventurous life, 
and at the camp-fire or on the long stretches of the 
road he makes the hours seem short with the story 
of his life. 

The Professor is elated, for we are going towards 
wonder-land, and he has absorbing passion for freaks 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 31 

of nature and curious forms of rock and stone, with 
open ear, too, for every touch of humor, and open- 
hearted for the loveliness there is in nature. The 
Dramatic Critic and the Eeporter sit beside each 
other, hilarious over the eternal picnic we have entered 
on ; and thus equipped, passing beside the Chinese 
graveyard, where Toot tells us he has often feasted 
on the chicken left by pious friends upon the graves, 
we go southward towards the mountains which wall 
in the scenes which we have come so far to see. 

The load is heavy, for the springs lie flat upon the 
axles; and while beyond Fort Ellis and over the 
heavy roads we journey, we may briefly tell some- 
thing of the place towards which our leaders' heads 
are pointed. 

In the Territory of Wyoming, in the northwestern 
portion, a tract of land, larger in area than Ehode 
Island and Delaware combined, by act of Congress, 
has been set apart for a national park. Nature here 
has gathered her masterpieces. Mountains tipped 
with eternal snows, forests, glens, and waterfalls, 
canons colored with such rare tints as eye has never 
seen, springs and rivers of boiling water, geysers, 
mud springs, lakes, mineral forests, flowers, all that 
eye can wish is here. All this is preserved as the 
people's pleasure place ; no devastating hand can de- 
spoil, no ranchman here shall feed his flock, nor 
farmer turn his furrow. The roads are rude as yet. 



32 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and in the journey of three hundred miles or more 
that we shall make we shall find no hint of village, 
hardly the dwelling-place of human soul. 

The first day of such a journey, however common- 
place, abounds with incident, for every faculty is all 
alert, — even so trivial a thing as the setting of the 
tire beside the road, wrapping it with canvas after 
the manner of the plains, delights ; while the long 
file of soldiers with dusty horses, returning from 
escorting General Sherman through the Park ; the 
cattle feeding on the ranches ; the shifting wonders of 
mountain, plain, and river ; the camp at evening ; the 
innumerable incidents along the way, — make pleasant 
the two days' journey to the Park. 

We have no word of censure for those who have 
delayed the road, for no iron horse on iron rails could 
make such royal journey as this of ours. Every hour 
the mountains seem clothed in rarer hues, and across 
the fords of rivers, camping at night beside streams 
flowing over grassy beds, riding beneath cliffs fitly 
named " Cinnabar," and over streams so noisy that the 
name " Hell Eoaring Creek " seems not out of place ; 
up and over great passes, with the river foaming far 
below ; through pleasant fields and glens, with crags 
and peaks and every form of nature that human vision 
can delight in, — so we come onward to the Park. 

Human enterprise is quite alive just here, and, 
anticipating that the terminus of the road would 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 33 

make a place of business, thrifty fellows had made 
at Gardiner a veritable city. The Dramatic Critic 
takes the census of the town, and reports thirty-two 
houses, and twenty-eight of them saloons. As we re- 
turn we notice at the post-office, which is the city's 
social centre, an absence of the ancient worthies we 
have seen before, to learn that they are in attendance 
on a " claim " meei^ing ; for gold, they tell us, has been 
found the day before, though in the pans they show 
us we confess we cannot see the " color " of which 
they speak, and much suspect that they are trying to 
boom the town. 

Four miles beyond and we are in the Park, and 
beneath us are the Mammoth Hot Springs. In the 
centre of the little valley is rising the great hotel of 
the Park Improvement Company, and on a little hill 
beyond the unpretentious house of the government 
superintendent. Beyond this, on either side, are 
thickly wooded hills, and on the east great mountains 
steep of ascent, like the walls of Webster from the 
Crawford Notch. 

For acres here the soil is spread with sinter, the de- 
posit from the boiling springs, white, with slight shade 
of yellow, most glaring to the eyes. Standing senti- 
nel in this great desolation are monuments of sinter, 
the Giant's Thumb and Liberty Cap, forty feet and 
more in height ; and then back, rising in terraces, are 
the famous springs. For two good miles or more 



34 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

above, the springs commence overflowing into pools, 
with great plateaus acres wide between, then flowing 
down and down in terrace-like descents to the val- 
ley's base. They are of every form : round like 
bowls, semicircular like balconies, with scalloped 
rims and corrugated sides. Some of these bowls 
are veritable cauldrons with seething waters; in 
others the water lies smooth as a mirror's face, rich 
in color and pleasant to the taste. It has magic 
power, for along the rims of these countless pools 
there are most exquisite decorations. The frost-work 
of a winter's window has not more dazzling wonders, 
delicate fretted work, flowers with rarest petals, cu- 
rious lace-work fashionings, and finer weavings, as 
•though a spider's web had stiffened into rock ; with 
coralline traceries and quaint arabesques, as though 
this were the fairy's workshop, and we had surprised 
them at their toil. The color, too, is marvellous. The 
prevailing tint is salmon, but shading into every hue, 
with such invisible transitions as the colors of a rare 
sea-shell ; and there are great bands of red and brown 
and creamy filaments floating in the water. In the 
St. Lawrence, just outward from the entrance-way to 
the Lake of the Thousand Islands, there is a great 
field of water vegetation. The water lies not many 
feet above the bottom, and beneath are such marvels of 
marine growth as we have never elsewhere seen ; flow- 
ers and weeds, delicately veined leaves and twining 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 35 

vines, richer because, like a Claude Lorraine glass, 
the transparent water adds its graces. But here are 
greater marvels, flowers of finer petals and richer 
hued; and the grace of form is not in our decep- 
tive vision, for beneath our microscopes even fairer 
wonders are revealed. These things are creations 
of the water, from it they receive their beauty 
and by it they exist ; and when the gentle tide 
recedes, these fair wonders change to the white 
sinter's dust. 

The living springs are numberless, — an area of one 
hundred and seventy acres is covered by them, — while 
the deposit left by the flowings of ages occupies an 
area of three square miles. But backward even into 
the forests a mile beyond are extinct springs, dry 
caverns, with spectral trees half buried with the 
sinter's dust, and Stygian caves emitting deadly 
fumes, and inland lakes set round with marvels, and 
walliug in the great wonder-place are hills set thick 
with foliage. 

We push onward now, for in our explorations we 
can only touch and go ; but we will not push with 
speed, for we are climbing Terrace Mountain, and 
in the two miles' ascent we must lift ourselves 
three thousand feet. The road is beautiful with 
forest scenes ; great reaches of sunlight leading into 
distant shade, and craggy rocks all draperied with 
moss, and such pleasant odors as the woods distil. 



36 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

A dead bear lies beside the road, and our driver tells 
us that we must keep good guard to-night at our 
camp close by. The road winds on in pleasant ways 
until, twelve miles beyond the springs, we come to the 
Obsidian Cliffs. These are basalt cliffs one thousand 
feet in length, perhaps two hundred feet in height, 
and are of pure volcanic glass. It is a mountain of 
jet, black, brilliant, hard as flint. It is literally a 
glass road over which we journey ; for Beaver Lake 
is just below, and the cliff runs its roots into the 
waters. Pick and drill have no power here, and only 
by building huge fires upon the rocks and breaking 
them by water poured upon the heated stone, could 
the road be made. 

Nine miles beyond, we stop for lengthy explora- 
tion of the Norris Geyser Basin. We are in the gey- 
ser region now, and out of the forest. Leaving our 
team to meet us later, we enter upon what seems to 
be a frozen sea. For miles around there is the sin- 
ter's desolation, with no relief for dazzled eyes save 
here and there a geyser's intermittent flow, and the 
green woods beyond. On the edges just where the 
woods come down are springs, and mud-pots seething, 
— boiling springs, and great cauldrons horrible to see. 
From the overlooking hill we survey the scene. No 
nightmare vision ever pictured desolation so great. 
Sahara's plains are soft and beautiful compared to 
this ; for there, is no malignity, but here, is desola- 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 37 

tion most complete, and added to it, in these steam- 
ing cauldrons, the spouting geysers, the dark veno- 
mous-looking mud-pots with their seething mass of 
variegated clay, there is active hate. The very soil 
beneath our feet is but a shell, — a frozen scum above 
a cauldron's waters ; and fissures yawn at us, and 
the thin crust bends, and from crack and seam come 
scream and hiss, as though in subterranean caverns 
vipers scented the coming of human prey. 

The desolation is oppressive ; the air is noisy with 
escaping steam from " Steamboat Vent," which is a 
huge cavern sending forth terrific roar ; and though 
there are emerald pools holding purest water in royal 
vessels, and sulphur crystals yellow as beaten gold, 
yet the scene is fearful in its vast unrelieved malig- 
nant weirdness. The " Minute Man " is a spouting 
geyser here, throwing steam some thirty feet in height 
each minute, while the larger " Monarch " once a day 
sends out a torrent of one hundred feet. Coming 
through the forest now, three miles or more, we de- 
scend into Elk Park, one of the pleasant places of 
which this great domain is full. It is almost circular in 
form, rimmed round with pleasant hills, thick-covered 
with foliage. A tiny spiral of steam rising in the 
woods beyond is all the token given that this is the 
geyser region. Beyond this it is as though a little 
English vale in Sussex had been transported here; 
and just beyond the town of Eipon, where the old 



38 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

path winds over the hills on its meandering way to 
Fountains Abbey, the fairest ruins in Europe, there is 
a scene like this. The grass is wild, but it has the 
pleasant lawn-like green of fields long mellowed by 
human culture ; and by such graceful slopings does 
it approach the hills, and by such gentle, lover-like 
approaches do the hills bend down to meet the fields, 
and so proudly rise the peaks that sentinel the valley, 
that, coming from the geysers yonder, entrance here 
is like the merging of a sleeper's nightmare into a 
peaceful dream. 

There is no sight of human habitation, no creature 
pastures in these fields, bright with ten thousand 
flowers ; like all the region, it is a solitude, save only 
the Gibbon Eiver, which flows along beside our wheels 
with sluggish flow. 

Into the Gibbon Eiver Canon we enter now. The 
river has roused with sudden passion, and fights its 
way along with tumult. Two thousand feet above us 
the walls rise up, scarred by frost and storm, yet 
decked with ferns and grasses, where the rock has 
softened into soil. And there are pleasant things 
along the way, — great bowlders in the stream, with 
trees like plumes upon them, and translucent springs, 
and boiling ones beside the way, and winding ways 
along the . bank, and sharp pitches downward to the 
river, and long reaches of wheeling in the stream 
hugging the cliff, and perilous fords, where wonder is 



THE YELLOWSTONE PAEK. 39 

alive as to whether the waters will submerge the 
wheels. 

There is no lovelier forest road than this ; for the 
air is resinous, and there are rare surprises of cliff 
and forest, and the road winds on in gentle curva- 
tures, while our wheels run noiselessly over the rich 
brown needles of the pine. Eight in the heart of 
the forest is the Gibbon Eiver Falls ; the descent is 
perilous, for the way is steep, and the walls of the 
river go down by sheer descent into a vast gulf. 
The falls are not wonderful here, but in New Ens:- 
land would be justly famous. 

The settings are incomparable ; for the chasm has 
grand sweeping lines, and the rock has no trace of any 
pity in fern or flower, but is stern and pitiless in its 
neutral tints, saying to us, if it speaks at all, that this 
is stern work, standing here for ages in the wilder- 
ness to guard this torrent. 

Out of the very heart of the hills the river comes ; 
it takes its moibentary leap, and, flecked with foam, 
moves out of the awful chasm again into the eternal 
shadows. 

The sun sets everywhere, but seldom with such 
rare colorings as tint the heavens now, as with hurry- 
ing wheels for the night's encampment, crossing the 
Divide through such a spectral forest as Dore paints 
for the journeys of the " Wandering Jew,'* we tether 
our horses beside the Firehole Eiver. It is a weird 



40 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

place. The river fed by the geysers has hardly cooled 
as yet, and when the great camp-fire is kindled, there 
are most uncanny shadows here. There is a strange 
witchery in this camping-place. The wind has most 
peculiar wail and moan; the camp-fire never before 
so transformed our little company. And why is it 
that to-night our guides, with such rare embellish- 
ments of fancy, tell of old fights with the Sioux and 
Pawnees ? All through the night the strange wind 
sighs above us ; beyond, the Stygian river flows with- 
out a sound; the camp-fire with its dying flames 
makes strange shadows till the dawn, while through 
the night the stealthy trampings in the forest seem 
to come from other beasts than those that draw us on 
our journey. 

Only a few miles beyond we come to the Middle 
Geyser Basin. The local name is " Hell's Half Acre ; " 
well bestowed, for here is the great Excelsior Geyser, 
the largest in the world. Looking down into it, it 
seems to be the crater of hell, two hundred feet in 
width, with jagged walls, and such terrific masonry 
as infernal spirits might have laid. The cauldron 
bubbles, seethes, and steams, giving no hint that 
twice a day it sends forth a stream of water that is a 
river sixty feet in diameter, and from sixty to three 
hundred feet in height. The little channels which 
carry constantly the drainage of the geyser are rare 
in beauty, being lined with delicate silken laminae of 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 41 

wondrous color, shading from white to rose, mauve, 
and scarlet. 

Behind this geyser, upward toward the hills, is 
the Grand Prismatic Pool. These other things are 
wonderful, and this whole region is the wonder-land ; 
but here, unless there is some unwonted sorcery in 
the atmosphere of this summer's day, is the most 
beautiful thing the whole round earth carries on 
its bosom, — a pool of water three hundred feet 
in width, deep in its central part, but shallow like 
the sea where it touches the sliore. The water is 
simply marvellous in beauty. A thousand rainbows 
must be dissolving here ; for from the central blue 
wondrous tints of emerald, sapphire, beryl, topaz, 
orange, green, yellow, all intermingle, — not simply 
dead color, but brilliant, flashing like polished gems. 
This comes from no enchantment of the sun; from 
every point the beauty is the same ; and though we 
climb into the forest, and look down between the 
branches, even then the great pool lies in the sun, 
like a vision of the celestial city. The settings of 
this wondrous thing are worthy of it. Its walls are 
carved, as no sculptor's chisel ever cut, with strange 
garlandings of leaf and flower, and rare enamellings, 
with silken filaments underneath concealing, yet re- 
vealing, fairer beauties. 

The Turquoise Pool, on a lower level, to one who 
will study its attractions, may almost dispute the 



42 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

supremacy with tlie more brilliant beauty just above. 
It is one hundred feet across, with irregular outline, 
having on its outer rim, where the water does not 
come, only the common sinter ; but just below, where 
the magic water touches, there are delicate enamel- 
lings, fawn-colored, changing into rings of every hue, 
with the ever-present mineral flowers that these wa- 
ters love spread in bounty everywhere. The water is 
translucent, and down into great depths it goes. The 
walls below are white like alabaster, but strangely 
veined like agate. Great projecting walls come out, 
broken into craggy summits, like tiny mountain ridges ; 
and there are winding roads against the cliffs, and 
little walls built upon the outer side, and marble 
bridges stained as though with age ; and underneath 
them torrents flow, and if one but had the finer vision, 
he would see, no doubt, armies winding up and down, 
and naiads looking at them from the peaks above: 
into all curious things this pool is broken, — caves 
and peaks, faint hint of castles, so marvellously has 
Nature wrought. 

Six miles above, fifty miles southward from the 
entrance of the Park, the geyser region culminates in 
the Upper Basin. This place contains four square 
miles, and within an area of half a mile is the 
greatest geyser region in the world. The surface is 
irregular, rising in ridges from the river, and on these 
are the multitude of geysers and boiling springs. It 



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK. 43 

is not easy to compute their number. There are at 
least twenty geysers of great size, with many others 
of lesser fame. They have built up a kind of collar 
around their orifices of geyserite, — hard, smooth, 
delicately tinted. Some of these in the older ones 
are great mounds, others small ; some with but one 
orifice, others, like the grotto, with many. The inter- 
val between the eruptions varies from one hour to 
fourteen days, the height of the stream also varying 
from twenty to two hundred feet. The geysers 
change from time to time, — old ones becoming ex- 
tinct, new ones breaking out in other places. They 
are of every form, from a plain cone to great fantastic 
grottos. The form of their flowing varies : some flow 
in a constant, even, symmetrical flow ; others, in great 
spurts. 

As we enter the basin, the Castle is rumbling with 
terrific violence. The water has just ceased, but for 
an hour at least there will be the sound of the sub- 
siding agitation. During our stay many others throw 
their stream, awing us with the majesty of their 
terrific power. One wonders here and is silent. He 
feels that there is a power slumbering beneath his 
feet, compared with which human strength is weak- 
ness; and stay he longer or shorter time, he never 
learns to become familiar with these vast forces 
imprisoned here. 

We pitch our tent among these things, and watch 



44 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and wonder. Once an hour Old Faithful throws its 
stream a good hundred feet, — beautiful by day 
as the fountains of Versailles ; but when the moon- 
light falls at night, what pen can tell the story of its 
loveliness ? 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 



To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. 

Lycidas. 



CHAPTEE III. 

SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 

BACKWAED on our track, ten miles or more, 
we must come to the forks of the Firehole 
before we branch eastward to the lake thirty miles 
away. The Madison Divide lies across the way, and, 
by long and tedious ascent, must be crossed. The 
way is through the forest now. Over the summit, 
dropping down a little, we come to Mary's Lake, a 
little mountain tarn, set round with woods. Pleasant 
alternations of woods and fields now follow ; and when 
we reach the Hayden Valley, and for hours wind over 
its rolling fields, we find that we have come upon 
another phase of the strangely varying scenery of 
this wonder region. Little bits of exquisite land- 
scape come in view, picturesque woodland scenes, 
with great rolling sweeps of verdure, bounded by 
the Washburn range, at whose feet is the crowning 
wonder of waterfall and gorge. Our camp at night is 
beside the Black Foot Creek, just in the fringes of 
the woodland where pasturage grows rank, and wood 
and water, the essentials of a camp, are found. 



48 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

The wagon road now winds on around the shoul- 
ders of little luttes which dot the Park; but in 
the clear morning air — being on horseback now — 
we can make straight passage towards the distant 
river, having time in our solitary journey to catch 
the full glory of this rare morning light, and see, 
unvexed by sound of wheel or human voice, the 
pleasant things along the way. There is, too, a 
slight hint of trail, and, even if we lose the course, 
we have but to go upon the summit of these little 
peaks to see the wagon winding on its way. It 
is a balmy air, and over Italy never brooded a 
fairer sky than this. The trail has curious wind- 
ings, and the grass is brilliant with many flowers. 
We know not whether, in the high altitudes, it is 
because the flowers are nearer to the sun that they 
have unwonted color, but nowhere is there such 
a field of cloth of gold as on the Alps, not half a 
mile on the south side of the very summit of the 
Simplon Pass ; and no florist's garden ever had such 
royal blue and yellow star-shaped flowers, as these 
that lie here looking at the sun. 

We are in the valley now, and in steady, even rise 
the fields slope upward to the forests, which come 
down in little points, with pleasant pasture-lands be- 
tween, running up beneath the branches into turf 
made brown with the needles of the pines. An elk 
with branching antlers is striding on, just beyond 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDEE-LAND. 49 

our bullet's range, if we had heart to kill; and across 
a river ford we now go upward into groves, not 
dense nor large, but such shady places as fringe the 
old pastures on the New England hills. The flow- 
ers only follow us to the borders of the woods ; but 
there are lights and shadows dancing here, and such 
sweet balsam odors as intoxicate. We are eight 
thousand feet above the sea, but there is no sigu of 
stunted vegetation. The road dips downward into 
pleasant valleys, then on again between the trees, the 
great ranges coming into vision on the summits. 
The solitude is absolute ; no cattle pasture here ; no 
smoke from any home ; no sound of bird nor in- 
sect, — nothing save the low sweet whispering of the 
pines, wondering to each other why this stranger has 
come to break their solitude. As we descend the 
hill, the great river comes in view. It is a lordly 
thing ; how broad it is ! green as Niagara, and swift 
as the "arrowy Ehone"! While descending a lit- 
tle on the river's bank, in the progress of our jour- 
ney, we look down into the river just where an 
indentation of the shore makes a little bay of quiet 
water, and there we count more than thirty trout, 
good fourteen inches long, we know; and this can 
be relied upon, because we are no fisherman, and 
have not that infirmity of conscience which makes 
an angler incapable of probity when speaking of a 
fish. 

4 



50 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

We have a friend at home who has always much 
annoyed us by speaking of the monster fish he 
catches, and simply that we may overtop our friend's 
romanciugs, we throw a fly into the stream, and (to 
be fairly honest) in less than forty seconds we land 
two of these monsters. 

We are going up the river now, and just where 
the lawn-like fields merge in the forest, opens wide 
the great lake we have come so far to see. We have 
large payment for our pains. It is something won- 
derful to think that if Mount Washington were sunk 
within these waters, down to the level of the sea, 
still the surface of the lake would be half the moun- 
tain's height above its summit. It has an area of 
some one hundred and fifty miles or more, in shape 
not unlike the open palm, with such extensions of 
bay and inlet as the fingers make upon the hand. 
The color is intensely brilliant, a bright sapphire 
blue. Did we dare to draw its outlines, we should 
say that on the northern side there is a long bluffy 
shore, with trees of fir and pine, terminating near 
the waters in pleasant pasture-lands, which catch 
and hold the evening light. Back of these is the 
great Wind Kiver range, most rugged peaks, with 
gnarled and seamy sides. The lake flows round out- 
jutting points, and then stretches out its sapphire 
arms in great reaches till it touches a rough wall of 
stone, which, if the intervening twenty miles do not 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 51 

deceive us, is a mountain, reaching np ten thousand 
feet or more, till it finds its thatch of eternal snow. 
Southward moving upon the other side, and there great 
tongues of mountains push into the lake, backed by- 
twin peaks, which seem to be within speaking-dis- 
tance of each other, but may be forty miles away. 
Coming nearer, we find a gentler mountain, which 
has so yielded to milder influences that it has per- 
mitted the warm fir-trees to clothe it. The old bar- 
baric temper is not all civilized out of it, for there is 
just one touch of snow hanging defiant still upon its 
front. And now far southward, with only a low arm 
of land, thick-wooded, and with perhaps another arm 
of the lake behind it, looms up the grand old Teton 
range, not serrated like the mountains on the other 
side, but broad-flanked and snow-crowned. 

There is an island lying midway in the lake, having, 
we know, fair scenes, if only there was boat of any 
kind upon the lake. The shores upon the western 
side slant down in pleasant beaches, covered thick 
with rare obsidian glass, petrified wood, jasper, chal- 
cedony, with little ridges of shining sand, black as 
ink, and windrows of pebbles mixed with stones of 
brilliant hue. The Yellowstone Lake is scarcely 
known, and yet it can but be the case that it is 
soon to take its place among the world's famous 
lakes. The English lakes, without their associations, 
are not so fair as this. Loch Lomond is a fadeless 



52 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

picture ; but the rare sunset which changed its waters 
into a lake of amethyst belongs not to it, and only 
once in a thousand years can it be illuminated with 
such glory as transfigured it before our adoring eyes. 
Maggiore is matchless in the placidity of its waters, 
with the Alps towering over them, with shores gar- 
landed with traceries of vine and thicket ; but it is 
a painted sea of dreams, and these islands are made 
by hand of man rather than the work of God. 
Como is beautiful beyond expression; to describe 
its beauties by common prose is profanation, — only 
poetry or music can picture Como with its waters 
winding in among the encircling hills, and its marble 
villas peeping out from groves of fig and lustrous veil 
of vine. But Como is a river rather than a lake, lack- 
ing strength, as do all these southern lakes. They 
are beautiful, but strength and beauty must be joined 
in bridal bonds to make the perfect scene. Lake 
Geneva in Switzerland, and our own Lake George, 
are hardly fairer than this almost unknown lake of 
wonder-land. Geneva is grander in proportions, the 
mountains slope in fairer lines, and there are terraced 
vineyards, and the inimitable charm that history and 
poetry give ; but this lake has larger breadth, and we 
do not think that even Geneva's waters ever have 
such rare brilliancy of hue ; while the mountains of 
Lake George, fair as they are in their great burly 
massiveness, lack the royal crown of these eternal 
snows. 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 53 

Five miles beyond, backward from the lake, by 
pleasant forest trail, we find the Natural Bridge, 
a span of thirty feet, thrown in shapely arch one 
hundred feet above the stream. 

There is some human interest here in our camp 
beside the lake, for there is coming now out of the 
forest the shaggy-bearded ranger whom two hours 
ago we met far back upon the Colorado trail. He has 
driven his twenty horses for five months thus through 
the wilderness from the far southern country; and 
later on we hear that he has stolen them from an 
Indian whom he murdered. At any rate, he is most 
shy of speech, keeping note of passing days by the 
notched stick hanging at his belt, and driving in the 
brood, — the little colts born on the journey through 
the woods, — the herd led on by a sorrel leader with 
a tinklinor bell. 

We have neighbors now making camp beside us 
on the bluff above the lake. A sick man, in a rude 
log cabin, has spent the summer here, coming from 
his distant home, cheated with delusive hope that 
this pure air might build again his broken lungs ; the 
librarian of Yale College is in the adjoining camp, 
most deft of hand in all the service of this gypsy life ; 
and when the night comes on, and the great camp-fire 
burns, we send invitation to our neighbors to come 
and visit us, and so we sit and talk beside the fire, 
— the Professors, of the wonders of the region ; old 



54 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

tourists, of routes of travel; the younger men and 
women, of other things, we guess, so soft and tender 
are their whisperings ; the ranger on the other side 
looking on in silence; while the great lake just down 
the bluff lies rippleless and beautiful in the moon- 
light of a perfect night. 

It is fifteen miles or more to the crowning glory of 
this wonder-land, the Great Gorge of the Yellowstone. 
We are on horseback now, and may take the trail, 
which carries us through denser woods and over higher 
summits than the wagon road, with slighter chance 
of disturbance of the solitude in which we wish to 
worship in this fair temple. We have stood in vesti- 
bule and aisle, but now we are approaching the altar 
where culminates the glory of the holy place. Most 
leisurely we journey in the winding paths, the air 
fragrant with the distillations of the pines, with 
glimpses of the river from the hills, and little fords 
from which we drink, bending from our saddles ; a 
sulphur mountain is beside the road, and there are 
pleasant pasture paths which seem like the sunny 
slopes of the familiar ISTew England hills. We see 
no human being on the way, nor any cattle feeding ; 
no living thing, except in one of the great streams 
whose waters touch our saddle-girths great pelicans 
stand watching us. But now the river is in angry 
mood ; in great waves it frets and storms and battles 
with the rocks along its way ; for we have found the 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 55 

rapids, and just beyond the little glen set round witli 
trees, where rises the smoke of our encampment, is 
the Yellowstone's Upper Falls. From the overtop- 
ping rock we may look down a hundred feet or more 
into the great chasm, where the rainbow lies amid 
the mist. There are stern rocks and bowlders here, 
which might appal us were they not so draperied 
with moss ; while beyond, out of the mist and shad- 
ows, the river flows laughingly between its banks of 
green. 

There is wanting little here to make the perfect 
picture, for the rapids are above, huge rocks mid- 
way in the stream divide the waters, and savage cliffs 
rise u]3 on either side, covered with such decora- 
tions as the mist-fingers have placed in seam and 
crevice. 

This wonder-land is poor in legendary lore, for the 
poet's wand has not yet called forth the stories of its 
past. There is, however, here just a touch of tragedy ; 
for this chasm has been the tomb of brave men. Not 
many years ago, somewhere in this region, there was 
an outbreak of the tribe of Crow Indians. The set- 
tlers were massacred ; and from the neighboring forts 
the troops came in to find atonement for the crime. A 
little band of braves, close pressed, came up the val- 
ley, and, weary with their flight, finding no rest nor 
hope of safety, halted here, resolved to die in good, 
brave fashion. They made a raft of fallen trees, gath- 



56 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

ering them from the woods close by, and tying them 
together with wicker-work of branch and vine, 
brought it to the river, just on the rapids' edge above 
the falls. The pursuing soldiers came, with swift 
advancings, through the woods, and when on the little 
cliff above they halted to fire upon the fugitives, 
the rude raft was launched, bearing its savage freight. 
The soldiers fired upon the fated crew ; the answering 
shot went back, the raft trembled on the brink, and 
then plunged into the abyss with dying brave and 
living warrior. 

Not quite a mile beyond, with pleasant path be- 
tween, over bridge of corduroy, in sight of cascade 
and grotto pools, we descend to the Lower Falls. We 
will go slowly down, because we have caught glimpse 
of the wonder-gorge, and cannot, v/ithout a pang of 
sadness, give up our loyalty to the falls behind, to 
which, not half an hour ago, we gave our heart. 

We have seen the upper walls of the great chasm, 
bright like the western sky at close of day, but we 
will watch the descending path, and shut out the 
vision, till now we stand upon the platform at the 
falls, and raise our eyes to such a scene as no other 
spot on earth can give. Language is but a clumsy 
thing with which to paint the glories of this wonder- 
place. The richest pigments of artists of largest 
fame have failed ; and while men have smiled at the 
flaming canvas, and said, "It is impossible," the 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 57 

baffled painter has grieved that his poor brush had 
failed to tell half the story of this exceeding loveli- 
ness. Behind us, as we stand upon the platform, are 
the quiet woods; the river narrows just above to 
eighty feet, and then with waters strangely green 
they plunge three hundred feet into the awful gulf. 
Niagara may leap twice as far as now, and hardly 
touch the stream below ; and while there is not Macr- 
ara's majesty, and only slightest tithe of its massive 
volume, yet where does water ever fall with such 
incomparable loveliness as here ? With steady hand 
clinging to the platform's rail, we will look down ; later 
on, from yonder peak, we will lie for hours in the sun, 
and yield ourselves to the fascinations of this royal 
scene. 

A great wall rises beside the falls ; on the yonder 
side it seems to be of porphyry, — so is it colored, 
— but there is rare tenderness of hue, as though 
a rime spread over it; and there are touches, too, 
of softer nature in fern and moss, with little edg- 
ings of green enamel such as Nature loves to lay 
around the sharp edges of crack and seam. In great, 
majestic, even poise the water, all unbroken, flows 
out into the air, gathering soon in little folds of lace- 
like streams, then breaking into mist before it changes 
into smoke three hundred feet below. 

There are sloping ledges down where the fall 
changes to a river, and behind the fall there are 



58 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

rocks curiously covered with dark grasses, as though 
draperied in a widow's weeds ; and there are others 
green with moss, and stones uncovered, save where 
the mist condenses and the little rivulets run down. 
Half-way up, just where the volume of the water 
shades thinner toward the sides, the water breaks 
into rocket-like jets; beside the walls it is a mist- 
torrent, farther on a wreath of smoke, while from other 
points of vision the water seems like angels falling 
down, trailing veils of mist. Never did waterfall 
pour itself into such royal vessel ; for the great gorge, 
rising from the river good two thousand feet, winds 
down eight miles or more. 

Strip this wonder-gorge of all these banners that 
cover it ; change it into bare walls of stone, walling in 
the silver ribbon at its base, and it is still marvellous ; 
for on the eastern side it rises up in steep ascent, 
ridged with great protruding veins, shaped into stern 
promontory and projecting walls, with little hint of any 
pitying earth upon it, till up against the sky it breaks 
into woods and fields running back into the hills. 

The western wall is made of softer stuff, and snows 
and torrents — the hungry teeth of winter frosts — 
have sculptured here such marvels as only those whose 
eye has seen will believe exist. Great columns, such 
as Titans might erect to celebrate victories, are here, 
and castles such as crown the Ehine, and gateways 
fit to sentinel the gardens of the gods ; peaks and 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 59 

towers, buttresses and bastions, rugged fortress, Gothic 
arches, and cathedral spires, — such would be the 
gorge if we had no eye to see the outward glory 
spread on this anatomy of rock. 

But the prism does not more dissolve the sun than 
do the walls catch and separate its glory. All the 
color which the sun in the ages has poured into the 
earth has been forced into these cliffs by the alchemy 
of the hot springs which make this wonder-land. The 
prevailing tint is yellow, but shading into lemon, 
orange, salmon, with great bands of white, chang- 
ing by invisible transitions to softer shades of rose 
and pink. Far down the gorge there are great 
blotches of red and scarlet, jutting cliffs of cinnabar, 
with rare background of such rich yellow as the 
sinter makes. Such for eight miles is the gorge, 
broken into every variety of contour, bearing its 
silver river down with many windings, rising up in 
most majestic sweep, and so rich in its transcendent 
colorings, that one might feel that a rainbow spread- 
ing its arch had been shattered here, and left its colors 
on the cliffs, or that this is some old Moorish city 
decorated for a fete. 

There are innumerable points of observation from 
these great projecting cliffs ; each one reveals a 
changing picture ; the path winds in and out, skirt- 
ing the chasm, which drops down at times in sheer 
descent, and again slopes so gently that the rocks 



60 E AMBLES OVEELAND. 

we roll go winding on the descending road for a good 
thousand feet before they find the precipice. Some 
half a mile down the gorge, just where the eye sees 
the falls as a noiseless sheet of spray, looking from 
the summit of the cliff, at least five hundred feet 
below, there stands a great monument, as solitary as 
Stylites' Pillar. On the summit of it, covering all its 
little surface, is an eagle's nest, made of coarsely 
braided branches ; and all day long the great eagle 
soars over the gorge, making the solitude even more 
complete. 

We have great desire to descend into the canon, 
and from the river's brink look up. Nowhere do 
we find a place where it seems possible that human 
foot can find safe passage. But at last we find a 
watercourse, whose way we can seem to trace even 
to the river, although we know that the lower space 
may be so foreshortened that the little gaps far be- 
low may perhaps be great impassable reaches. With 
heavy clamberings over rock and bowlder we descend, 
until, finding every step fatiguing, we rise on the 
brook's wall, which goes down in a kind of ridge with 
somewhat gentle slope. We will go on by this until 
it terminates in the great Cinnabar Tower, which is 
one of the famous things within the gorge, and then 
we will descend its side into the stream again, and 
so go downward to the river. But the wall grows 
narrow, until, between us and the widening rock 



SAUNTERINGS IN WONDER-LAND. 61 

which leads on to the tower, there is only a narrow 
ridge not half a dozen feet in width. There is ample 
space for walking, if only the sloping walls did not de- 
scend so far, and we have no surety of steady nerves to 
keep us on the track ; so, commencing hack, we run 
across. We have come thus to the great cliff, brilliant- 
hued, square, massive, like some old mediaeval fortress, 
and, climbing up with perilous toiling, we look down 
from its summit into the fearful chasm. Coming back 
a little, we descend into the bed of the brook, which 
we will follow to the river. The descent is hard ; for 
the soil is only shaly rock, with only such security 
as roots of stunted trees, long dead, can give. We 
reach the stream, now dry in the summer's drought, 
cross over, when, lo ! we find the river's course ter- 
minates in a precipice, so steep, that we can see no 
line of wall, so deep, that the river there seems 
almost as indistinct as from the summit yonder. We 
are not sorry, for the way is long behind us to retrace, 
and already the shadows gather in the gorge; but 
such is the fatal curiosity of man, that we desire 
to go at least to the very verge of the precipice, 
to see how far indeed the walls descend. We go 
with cautious clingings, until we are at the brink, 
just where the sloping bank goes downward to the 
edge. 

There are three of us, and the most adventurous 
one, lying half-extended on the sloping bank, seeks 



62 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

to let himself down a little nearer, when suddenly 
he feels the shaly mass slide with him towards the 
gulf of horrors. He stretches out his hands, but the 
soil he clutches is in motion, and only when in an- 
other moment he must plunge over the fearful preci- 
pice does the moving mass stop its motion. So near 
is he to the brink, that his staff falls over from his 
grasp, and with bleeding hands he crawls back to 
safety. 

We have slight heart now to continue exploration ; 
with painful effort we gain the summit, trying, only 
with ill success, to laugh away remembrance of the 
peril we have passed. But at night in our little 
camp beside the rapids more than once we have 
vision of the towering cliff, and in our broken dreams 
feel the motion of the treacherous soil bearing us 
silently over the precipice into the gulf of death. 



A FIETY-MILE WALK. 



Pacing through 
Chewing the food of sweet and hitter fancy. 

Ad You Like It. 



CHAPTER IV. 

A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 

THERE is no road from the Lower Falls to the 
Mammoth Hot Springs except the one over 
which we have travelled. There is, however, a trail 
passable for foot travellers and saddle horses ; and as 
there are many attractions along the way, the three 
younger members of the party conclude to take this 
trail, and meet the outfit on the third day at the 
springs, fifty miles away. We have brought saddles 
for our leaders for just this trip, and with the light- 
ened load Toot tells us that he can make his time 
with the wheelers only. As one at best must walk, 
we conclude to make the trip on foot. 

The nights are severely cold in these high latitudes, 
and without the shelter of a tent we shall have good 
need of covering ; so in the preparations for the jour- 
ney each takes a pair of blankets, with overcoat and 
gossamer, all deftly wrapped around the canned pro- 
visions that shall feed us. Even a pair of blankets 
and an overcoat make a fair-sized pack for a three 
days' summer march ; but add to this several solid 

5 



66 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

cans of provender, and it is not wonderful that at the 
start it pulls a little heavy on the straps, and before 
the walk is ended it weighs a ton at least. 

Just above the Lower Falls the trail leads off, 
passing over pleasant hills, into the surprising park- 
like pastures which so abound in this wonder-region. 
The day is one of the rare days which sometimes in 
New England come in early autumn, when the air is 
balminess itself, and every leaf stands outlined in 
the sun. We stop for dinner at a pleasant brook, 
and, with such elation as children have, kindle our fire 
beside the stream and undo our packs. We find, with 
consternation, that we are wretchedly provisioned. 
In the hurry of our start each has selected what he 
deems his proportion of the outfit for the walk, 
and so, when our elaborately decorated cans are placed 
in line, we find that every one of us has chosen the 
" Boston Baked Beans " with which our outfit was 
liberally supplied. A solitary can of oysters aloue 
varies the eternal monotony of beans, while the crack- 
ers, which at the start had filled the pockets of our 
coats, had been nibbled on the way, and, with only 
a slight residue of powdery crumbs, are gone. 

A little piece of bacon, which somehow stews it- 
self away into the blackest, crimpiest kind of sub- 
stance, is the only meat we have provided ; while the 
package that contains the tea we bring has broken in 
our pockets, in the exigencies of the morning walk. 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 67 

giving, in the subsequent ste wings of the journey, 
a nondescript decoction of oolong, cracker-dust, and 
the frayed shoddy nap of our pocket linings. We 
have many friends in Boston. AVe have lived with- 
in sight of its gilded dome, and have often mused 
beside the Frog- Pond of its Common. "VVe have never 
made invidious remarks about its crooked streets, 
sneered at its institutions, believed that a Boston na- 
tive is simply " the east wind made flesh," nor cher- 
ished the heresy that one born in Boston has any 
need to be born again. But when we see here upon 
the grass beans to right of us, beans to left of us, 
and think that for two days and more we must feed 
absolutely on this plebeian diet, our hearts sink, and 
our tongue would keep unwonted silence should all 
the world rise to defame the " Modern Athens " ! 

We have no seasoning of any kind, nor spoon, nor 
knife, — nothing but unseasoned beans to be eaten with 
a woodeu spoon. A bean is a kind of delusive thing, — 
it fills, but does not satisfy ; and this eating from the 
original package with a cedar-tasting wooden spoon, 
sweetening the unsavory meal with weak libations of 
a kind of crackery, pocket-lining flavored liquid, with 
no hint of sugar, milk, or any sweet disguisings, is 
getting back to nature to a degree we never have 
aspired to. 

Filled, but not fed, we push on. The trail increases 
in the beauty through which it leads us. We are on 



68 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

the flanks of Dunraven Mountain, now going upward 
through pleasant woods. Long vistas open, and in 
the sun the perfect peaks stand clear and beautiful. 

The trees run upward farther than we have ever seen 
on the New England mountains, and so broad of 
branch are they, that it seems as if an orchard from a 
N'ew England farm had by some magic been hung here 
beneath the snows. There are such resting-places be- 
side the little fords as the fairies might have chosen 
for their bathing-places, and for great spaces the trail 
winds through fields of flowers brilliant with the 
rich colorings of this rare region. The wild mustard 
changes the pasture slope into a field of the cloth of 
gold, with buttercups where the grass is closer woven, 
and blue gentians too, and in the woods delicate 
sprays of columbine and the rare Indian Plume, 
changing its hues from deep rich carmine to ver- 
milion and magenta. 

So we toil upward, the heavy packs borne easily 
because of the glory that lies along the way. Wash- 
burn has been in sight all through the day, separated 
from the trail by a foot-hill, itself a mountain. Our 
trail should lead over the summit of Mount Wash- 
burn, and when we find that the crest of the Divide is 
passed and we are leaving the mountain behind, we 
know that we have missed the diverging path. We 
go back a mile at least ; but we do not find it, and 
forgetting that these mountains are not like the moun- 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 69 

tains we have been wont to climb, without longer 
searching for the trail we commence the ascent forth- 
with, making our own path as we go up. But we have 
forgotten the weight of our heavy packs and the ex- 
ceeding rarity of the air upon these heights. For 
two hours at least we climb the foot-hill, with in- 
finite w^eariness, only to find when on the summit, 
though we have crossed great drifts of snow, that we 
are at least two thousand feet below the peak of 
Washburn, and must descend into the valley a thou- 
sand feet before we can begin the ascent. The day 
is drawing on, and we are not fresh as in the morn- 
ing ; but there is the summit we have come to see, and 
see it we must before the darkness comes. 

We rest long in the little valley far below. Arca- 
dia never had sweeter place than this, with grass so 
green, and little streams so bright and musical, and 
such infinite sunniness, with no trace that ever hu- 
man foot before had found its loveliness. 

The summit seems miles away, and the ascent is 
more than steep. To simply raise ourselves to such 
a height would have appalled us once, but now we 
must carry these heavy packs, and make the journey 
in an atmosphere so rare that simple breathing is 
work enough. 

At the very start, — for we are already eight thou- 
sand feet above the level of the sea, — our stages of 
progress are but brief ; and as we climb, shorter and 



70 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

shorter, are the journeys, until towards the summit, 
no matter how thoroughly we are rested, only twenty 
steps are needed to compel us to stoj), panting, breath- 
less, utterly exhausted, so tired that we dare not sit 
lest we may not be able to raise again the burden of 
our packs. For two hours we thus climb ; conversa- 
tion long since has ceased, for we have little breath to 
spare, and there is that semi-dizziness that comes 
with such exertions. Each one seeks the way that 
seems the easiest, and when w^e reach the narrow 
ridge we are far apart. Not yet is the summit 
found. There, five hundred feet above us, with 
yawning precipices on either side, stands the goal 
of our desires, with narrow, tortuous way between, 
rising above great gulfs of blackness and leading on 
round bowlders scarred with many storms. There is 
need of diligence of eye and foot, for we must swing 
ourselves around these cliff-like points, with only such 
protection as strong arms can get clinging to crack 
and crevice, our heavy packs hanging over awful 
chasms, seeking to pull us down to the great gulfs a 
thousand feet below. Even now we wonder whether 
it be possible to gain the summit and go downward to 
the timber line for camp before the darkness comes, 
and whether we shall not stop right here beneath 
the little shelter of the summit, and make our camp- 
fire of the bleached branches of the stunted firs, find- 
ing water in the melted snows. But we have heavy 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 71 

work before us on the morrow, and must have no 
dalliance here ; and so, tightening strap and pack, we 
commence the final climb. It is a treacherous path, 
and only that no wind is blowing, and that we watch 
with utmost wariness each advancing step, do we 
safely pass over shaly rock, and around these cliffs, 
daring not for one brief moment to look downward, 
lest, with weakened nerve, foot and hand lose their 
cunning grasp, and we go downward with our packs 
to such destination as we know not of. Here, then, 
we are at last upon the summit, with the Arcadian 
valley in the shadows far below, and the great clouds 
marching over the vast timber belts, — perched, pack 
and all, upon the topmost stone of the monument of 
rock, with the old mountain conquered at our feet. 

It is a barren victory, for though we are ten thou- 
sand feet and more above the sea, and though the 
guide-books tell us of the strange emotions that we 
ought to cherish, and though other visitors riding 
here by some trail to us unknown have made the 
record that there is nowhere in the world view so 
beautiful and majestic, still it is not so wonderful as 
we had hoped, nor have we large usury of payment 
for the hardest day's work we have ever had in many 
years of mountain climbing. 

The vision sweeps the circle of a hundred miles 
or more ; great mountains, timber-mantled and snow- 
crowned, encircle us ; the lower hills are draperied 



72 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

with forests woven with velvet softness ; the pastures 
are green and lustrous, like the English lawns ; the 
great lake lies like a jewel southward in the verdure ; 
and yonder crest of color is the marvel-gorge lifting 
its banners above the Yellowstone, started on its 
journey of six thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. 
But there are other mountains where peaks as 
sharp and beautiful as these are visible ; and this 
foliage is not so rare as the vestiture of Mount Carter, 
seen from Tuckerman's Eavine ; nor are these pastures 
green, like the Conway meadows from old Kearsarge ; 
nor is the desolation of this summit, albeit its scars 
are yet flaming red all over us, so grimly savage as 
Chocorua's peak; while lake and gorge, unless our 
weariness has somewhat robbed the eye of seeing, 
are not from this high mount of vision the marvels 
that they seemed, when we stood before them and 
saw, with slight interval of space, the rare beauties 
which are their heritage. There is a weirdness here, 
for the solitude is absolute. These vapor columns 
that we see are not the smoke of farmers' cottages, but 
the steamings of the springs. The lake beyond has no 
keel to vex it ; there is no trace of village, nor human 
soul, perhaps for miles beneath us ; and this is a 
weird land of geysers, mineral mountains, and chasms 
that terrify the eye. This region eastward is the Hoo- 
doo land, w^ith forests of stone, agatized trees, strange 
monsters stone-impr;soned, — a goblin land, carved 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 73 

into majestic weirdnessby elements working in the sol- 
itude for ages. There is tragic interest here ; for over 
these hills Evarts, a tourist, wandered, lost for weeks, 
feeding uj^on roots and weeds, until at last, a skeleton, 
crazed with suffering, he was rescued, — the published 
tale of his long wanderings not excelled in vividness 
by any tale of adventure in the English tongue. 

But the night comes on, and we must travel long 
before we reach a camping place. The descent is 
easy, our heavy packs but lightly felt. The peaks 
grow purple as we go down, and the sun attends us 
with the beacon fires it kindles on the peaks. Great 
drifts of snow are along the way, and for two hundred 
feet we slide downwards as we used to do in boy- 
hood ; and we slake our thirst from glacier pools, and 
over the hills, in the trail we now have found, down- 
ward dropping into the darker shadows, we push on 
for the timber where we shall make our camp. 

The hills are in terrace-like descendings here, and, 
though we hasten on for miles, the elusive forests are 
beyond us still. It is growing dark, and there is no 
prospect of reaching shelter before dense darkness 
comes ; our only hope is to go down a thousand feet 
to the creek below and make our camp, although 
upon the morrow we must make weary climb again 
backward to the trail. It takes some Christian grace 
to thus add, without complaining, a useless journey to 
our pilgrimage ; and the way is rough, thick-set with 



74 RAMBLES OVERLAND, 

pitfalls, with yawning holes that wrench the weaned 
muscles. The valley of the brook is reached, but it is 
a bog, with fallen timber and tangled thickets running 
into marsh ; the water lying here in brackish pools, 
as though snakes and crawling vipers might be en- 
camped among them. We have been ankle-deep not 
once but many times in the treacherous bog. We are 
parched with thirst, faint with weariness and hunger, 
and not yet can we tell that, even if we can find foot- 
hold between the alder bushes there, we shall find a 
running stream. We separate and search, fearing 
each step in the advancing darkness, lest we may be 
engulfed. But the stream is found, — cool, limpid, 
albeit its banks are but blackened peat ; on the other 
side the ground is hard, rising toward the mountains ; 
forty feet away we drop our packs and hasten to 
make our fire, that we may see what place we have 
for the sleeping of the night. Hardly a moment 
after the fire is crackling, made of grass and branches, 
and at once we start backward to the brook for water. 
But so has the darkness come, that we cannot find 
our way, and only by a torch from the fire do we 
reach the stream, over which we have come scarcely 
five minutes before. 

A confession of self-humiliation is not a pleasant 
thing, and were we not an honest chronicler, we 
would fain let the darkness of our camp hide the 
sufferings of a memorable night. We are famished 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 75 

pilgrims; eight hours ago, we ate our unseasoned 
beans, and the toil of half a lifetime has happened 
since. And now here beside the bog, with only faint 
hope that the tangled grass is not the hiding-place of 
snakes, knowing not where ^ve are, or what things 
are close beside us, we sit down to satisfy exhausted 
nature with a bean. The can-opener is gone, and 
with frail penknife must we open the solitary can of 
oysters that we have. We can only half warm the 
liquid, and then with pronged sticks we fish out the 
mollusks, drinking the liquid as the " loving-cup " is 
drained by passing from guest to guest, the sharp 
edges of the can cutting us, and the liquid, though 
most nourishing, having unpalatable flavor of verdi- 
gris, with little bits of solder held in only half solu- 
tion. We fry the bacon, holding it against the coals 
upon a stick ; but it sizzles itself away, it catches fire, 
the toasting-fork is involved in the conflagration, and 
there is left only a charred ember, so curled around 
tlie stick that we cannot in the eating easily decide 
where the stick begins and the bacon ends. We essay 
to make some tea, and in the emptied oyster-can, only 
half rinsed, we fear, we place half a handful of the 
conglomerate in our pocket, making a draught com- 
pared with which the hemlock draught of Socrates 
must have been as the very nectar of the gods. AVe 
have no heart to tell of the course that followed. 
The bean, though baked in Boston, is not a fruit that 



76 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

epicures miglit choose for a dessert, but we are not 
encamped in the vicinity of markets, and our lar- 
der now contains no other thing than these same 
beans. 

Guided by such light as the camp-fire gives, we 
pile the w^ood high for the night and make promises 
of watchfulness ; then wrapping blankets round, with 
the great deep blackness over us, and such movement 
in the air as sounds like the whisperings of ghosts, 
we close our eyes to such sleep as our weariness may 
woo. The fire burns brightly for a while, the dried 
grass catching and causing us not once but many 
times to rise and beat out the spreading flames ; but 
the fire is fed only with the substanceless cotton- 
wood, and long before the morning dies to ashes. 
The great white frost comes on, and when we wake, 
long after the sun is up, we find the crystal rime 
spread over us, and cease to wonder why it is that 
we have sliivered through the night. The break- 
fast is severely plain. Another can of the detested 
beans is opened, and nature is again insulted, not 
satisfied. 

We have never had repugnance to the ongoing of 
our life, and have no ambition now to add to the 
legendary interest of the Washburn trial by leaving 
our skeleton here to adorn a moral or garnish a tour- 
ist's tale. But now we refuse to again put the de- 
tested cans within our pack, and vow most solemnly 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 77 

that we will not eat another bean though we may- 
die upon the journey, considering death a pleasant 
fate compared with such repast. 

Upward, with heavy tugging at our packs, onward 
five miles or more, and we come to the great open 
pasture space, shaded with mammoth pines, where 
the trail divides to go down and round the cliff, up- 
ward to Tower Falls. The path is tortuous, but great 
basaltic cliffs of sulphur are in sight, just where 
Tower Creek joins the Yellowstone. The way now 
is beside the stream, over such bowlders as the great 
cliffs have dropped. But the stream is close beside 
us, fretting, fighting over rock and jutting point, bat- 
tling its way onward to the sea. Great towers, shapely 
as cathedral sj^ires, rise on either side, with slender 
fingers, like the minarets of a mosque, strangely col- 
ored, forming royal setting for the water, which, from 
two hundred feet above, falls into the boiling chasm. 
The surroundings are much like those of Minnehaha 
Falls, only here is greater majesty. It is a mile down- 
ward by the path, while if we can but climb the walls 
of the canon, we shall find the path just there upon 
its crest. 

We begin the climb of four hundred feet. The 
wall is perpendicular almost, but so scarred and 
broken that it seems not difficult to find holdino^ 
place for hand and foot. We are soon convinced 
tliat it is a fool's folly, but our blood is up, and 



78 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

we have no temper for defeat by a little wall like 
this. 

Starting together, we are soon separated, each work- 
ing on by different lines ; up and over rocks, clinging 
to roots of trees long dead, baffled by sheer ascent of 
smooth ledge and rock, retreating, finding new paths, 
going on a little to be again defeated, pushing up, 
confronting obstacles, balancing the conditions of 
safety in going up or back, — so for two hours, at least, 
we wrestle with the cliff ; almost at the summit once, 
we must go back, making the descent with peril. So 
onward, with every muscle tense as steel and every 
faculty alert, the jagged bowlders waiting for us down 
there in the gulf, and the pleasant sky above beckon- 
ing, we climb with painful toil. 

At last, when only the pasture is fifty feet above, 
we come to a projecting cliff; we must climb over 
this or retrace our steps, and retreat is now impos- 
sible. The problem is a study while clinging to the 
rocks ; but standing upon utmost tip of foot, blindly 
groping on the surface of the rocky shelf, we find a 
dead root, and testing it with gradually increasing 
power, we hazard at last our life upon its strength. 
Swinging clear, with no other hold than this, we climb 
upward and so onward to the summit, to lie there, with 
torn garments and scarred hands, till slowly the weary 
muscles shall be rested and the excited nerves become 
calm again. The others have found like peril, and 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 79 

half through the tramping of the afternoon there is 
little said, by reason of remembrance of the danger 
we have braved, and only by utmost effort been 
delivered from. 

Downward still four miles or more, leaving Jack 
Barronett's bridge above us, we come at four o'clock 
into Pleasant Valley, in sight of Yancy's cabin, the 
only sign of habitation we have seen for days. No 
palace ever had such royal look as this " shack " of 
logs at the foot of the six-mile hill. We find Yancy's 
hired man in charge, and the star-route mail-carrier 
to the miner's camp beyond, stopping for the night. 
We rest upon the bunk of skins while these men 
prepare repast. Was there ever such kingly feast as 
this ! Steaks of antelope, and great fritters floating 
in black West India syrup, and potatoes just a little 
soggy, and bread, saleratus-hued ; but, oh ! so much 
better than the beans ! Never before did we eat so 
long with no increasing sense of fulness. After ten 
minutes' service we are just as hungry as at the start, 
and we begin to fear, perhaps, that the old story of 
Munchausen's horse, who drank dry the river because 
cut off just behind his mouth, might be finding mod- 
ern repetition in these three pilgrims seated here in 
Yancy's shack. 

We have always boasted of our pedestrian powers, 
but when we see the hill beyond and the great pack 
we have to carry, and know that the blessed Toot 



80 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

must be met upon tlie morrow sixteen miles away, 
our pride of walking vanishes, and we are like the 
old French bishop who used to say of worldly com- 
forts, " All, all is vanity except a carriage 1" and so we 
vow that we will not walk, though we may have to 
give our kingdom for a horse. 

Neither the carrier nor Yancy's man can leave the 
place for an entire day, nor spare the horses for us ; 
but in the road outside a shaggy-bearded teamster 
with a load of ore offers to sell, for fair consideration, 
an extra horse he leads behind. We are ripe for 
desperate things, and as we pass our pack and see the 
mighty hill beyond, we are in good mood for any 
folly. But such a horse we never before put eyes 
upon. It is a compliment to say that it is lame ; 
every leg is out of shape, corrugated with spavin, 
ringbone, and every fungus that fastens on a horse, 
with only one poor watery eye, and such demure ab- 
jectness as we have never seen in a horse's face before. 
The critical mood is not on us, for we are in sight of 
both pack and hill, while our resting has revealed the 
stiffness of our limbs. Did the horse have but one 
good leg, we would surely buy him ; but there is 
nothing on which to fasten hope of help, and so we 
say, "Why, man alive, we don't think that horse 
can carry himself over that hill;" and the miner 
answers, " I know he can't, and that is why I want 
to sell him." 



A FIFTY-MILE WALK. 81 

We charter for the hill, however, Yancy's horse 
for the packs, and mounted on the star-route beast, 
with the man to bring them back, we go on. Life 
seems worth living once again, and when two hours 
later we dismount, we are fully rested, one of our 
companions meantime finding, as he walks beside 
Yancy's man, who leads the pack-horse, that years 
before they had been students together in a univer- 
sity in the Empire State. 

By Black Tail Creek, at eleven o'clock, we make 
our camp, sleeping by the roadside in the open air, 
and on the following day, by pleasant road over the 
grassy plateaus and lava beds of the creek, beside 
the superbly beautiful falls of the Gardiner Eiver, in 
sight of mountains now familiar to us, we reach our 
journey's end at the Mammoth Hot Springs, the place 
of rendezvous, where we are to meet in an hour's 
time the outfit left by us three days ago. While we 
sit on the ground, with back against a workman's 
cabin, reading a week-old daily we have borrowed, 
the leaders of our wagon come in view ; and albeit 
he is no Apollo, we make confession that we have 
never seen before a man so absolutely beautiful 
as that same Toot, who is to carry us out of wonder- 
land. 

Upon the morrow, which is the Sabbath, we are 
beyond the borders of the Park. At the doorway of 
our tent at Yankee Jim's our driver leaves us for a 

6 



82 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

moment, wishing to go, he says, to morning mass. 
We hardly think he means it, for, as we pass the 
saloon soon after, from beside the bar within we hear 
the voice of Toot saying to a fellow-driver, " Let us 
shake for drinks ! " 



OYER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 



Thus far into the bowels of the land 
Have we marched on without impediment, 

KiCHARD III. 



CHAPTER V. 
OVER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 

HELENA is simply the old-time Crab Town in 
a later stage of evolution. 
In the summer of 1883 it is the eastern terminus 
of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the metropolis 
of Montana. It lies at the foot of the Rocky Moun- 
tains, on the first slopings of the fair Prickly Pear 
Valley. The washings of the hills have made this 
valley strangely fertile, and nowhere have we seen 
more thriving farms or larger crops than in the region 
around tliis thriving capital The city is built upon 
the tailings of a mine, for the Last Chance Gulch 
is here, and from the territory now cut into city lots 
and household yards gold to the value of ten mil- 
lions of dollars has been taken. There is no poetry 
about the tailings of an abandoned mine ; rocks and 
gravel intermingle, and barrenness is supreme. In 
the outskirts of the town, the little houses placed in 
the midst of this colorless refuse are pitiful in their 
abject desolation ; but where larger wealth has built 
its homes, the tiny cottages sit in little lawns of 



86 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

green, and patient fingers have civilized the stony 
soil into fruitfulness. 

The city is typical of this Western life. Luxury 
and rudeness jostle each other; frontier barbarisms 
mingle with the latest fashions from " the States ; " 
the cowboy and the drummer ("time's noblest off- 
spring is the last ") eat at the same table, and per- 
chance sleep in the same bed, in the taverns of this 
overcrowded city ; while the electric light looks down 
on the strangest panorama of crowding, hurrying life 
that we have seen. 

The railway approaches completion, only a few 
miles away, and Helena is the terminus now of the 
Continental Road. There has been a new adjustment 
of prices. With the coming of the iron rails luxury 
has entered ; there is a larger outlook, a larger life. 
Helena is the supply city of the richest mining 
region in the Territory, and capital is coming here to 
plant itself in the new ventures with which the air 
is full. 

There is a strange life here, and the casual visitor 
cannot fail to catch the feverish enthusiasm every- 
where felt. Only with difficulty do we find rooms. 
The hotel is pretentious in outward appearance, but 
having behind this, where the lodgings are, the rude- 
ness of the pioneer days ; the electric light shines 
down upon the hotel office, and in the open safe we 
see at least a score of revolvers, left for custody by 



OVER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 87 

the guests. The street is filled with a motley array 
of vehicles : road wagons fresh from Eastern factories ; 
great mule teams from the mines ; the trotters of the 
city sports ; the slow-paced farmers' teams ; loaded 
stages from the mountains are coming in ; while on 
the sidewalk tenderfoot and tramp, miner and trades- 
man, cowboy, prospector, farmer, move up and down. 
At night the city is alive ; the gambler's den is open, 
and the concert hall sends out the twang of its 
guitars and the rickety voices of its alluring song- 
sters ; the roulette-table has its little band of victims ; 
while in the side streets and multitudinous alleys of 
the city one sees such interminglings of thrift and 
poverty, such restless, incessant feverish toil, as causes 
every nerve to thrill with sympathetic restlessness. 
There are public buildings of imposing magnitude, 
fine churches, and no slight evidences of wealth. The 
general aspect of the city, however, is that of unrest, 
the temporary halting-place of an encampment ; and 
while the business streets have showy solidity, one 
has but to go to the rear to see that behind these am- 
bitious fronts there is a conglomeration of sheds and 
hanties, the architecture being, as some one has said, 
" Queen Anne in front and Crazy Jane behind." But 
nowhere have we seen such stir and movement ; even 
sight of such activity gives exhilaration. Here enter- 
prise can find a work and capital a field, while in the 
fairer homes that are rising — the changing of the old 



S8 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

desolation of the mining-camp into a luxurious city 
— we see the evidence of the ameliorating power that 
comes with contact with the outward world. 

One hundred and thirty miles away, far beyond the 
Eocky Mountains, is Missoula, our destination, where 
we shall find the railway which shall bear us down 
the Pacific Slope. A single wheelman has posses- 
sion of the street in the early morning when we come 
out to take the stage, — the fattest rider, we will 
wager, that can be found between the two seas, — 
riding up and down with perspiring face and totter- 
ing wheel, causing apprehension as he sways, lest, if 
the expected fall sliould come, through the blockaded 
street our heavy coach will fail to get us out of town. 

A journey to the Pacific over an uncompleted road 
is a series of disenchantments. We had dreamed of 
the passage of the Pockies on the summit of a Con- 
cord coach, with prancing leaders and strange adven- 
tures. The actual coach is a nmd-wagon, — never a 
tiling of beauty, nor designed as a palace of art or 
luxury. The wheels are heavy, and inclined to heat 
upon the axles ; the seats are made of plank, veneered 
with the slipperiest of leather ; the windows are half 
a foot too low for any kind of seeing out, while the 
venerable ark is so low-studded that wdth every jolt- 
ing of the road one plays at shuttlecock with roof and 
seat, with constant questionings as to which has 
greatest malignity of hardness. 



OVER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 89 

We had tried by every specious flattery on the pre- 
vious evening to secure a seat from the saffron-haired 
dude that kept the booking-office ; but the places 
were engaged, and we had only the sorry choice of 
riding upon the seatless top, or staying over till the 
completion of the road in the early autumn. The 
stage comes up, and we inspect the instrument of our 
two days' torture. We have not to sit upon the untem- 
pered oaken top, for a dirty canvas is tightened over 
it with long strips, which, with the natural suction of 
the body, will help to hold us on, we hope. There is 
no hint of rail ; but the corners are so rounded that 
in our slippings off we shall probably clear the wheels, 
which is something of a comfort. The inside seats 
are filled ; the driver has two passengers who have 
waited over to share his seat ; tlie baggage of the con- 
tinent seems to be piled upon the rack ; the mail- 
bags are tied beneath the foot-board ; and just as we 
hasten to climb up to select the slat on which we 
shall impale ourselves, we are told to wait till the 
baggage takes precedence. A zinc-covered trunk 
is made the background of the deck scenery, the 
rounded top, with half-driven nails protruding, and 
little scraps of metal reaching out their ragged edges, 
furnishing bumping place for our untutored spines. 
Bags of oats are then laid down lengthwise of the 
deck, the vacant place towards the driver being filled, 
at least a foot too higli, with sundry satchels for our 



90 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

feet ; the whole mass tied on with a wiry kind of 
hempen rope, which we may cling to if only we can 
get our fingers between it and the unyielding oats. 

This is hardly the ideal we have dreamed of in our 
Eastern home. But we take our place with six other 
martyrs on the oats, braiding ourselves together as 
we can, — cowboy, miner, hostler, tourist, tramp, and 
parson, — • not over sure that united we shall stand, 
but very certain that divided we shall fall. 

The horses much need the oats that we can spare ; 
the prancing element is wanting, but they are faith- 
ful, and deserve the pity that age commands. It is 
the last month of the old stage dynasty that once 
ruled from St. Paul to the Pacific, and these are the 
relics of a lost empire. We are the last victims of a 
dying tyrant. 

The champion swearers of the world may be se- 
lected, and we will put the Montana stage-drivers 
against them, man for man, giving any odds that may 
be asked. They swear for very love of it, — at their 
horses, at each other, at marks along the road ; they 
swear into the air, they soliloquize in oaths, with the 
smallest gamut, too, of curses ; a brainless repetition 
of profane idiocies, that keeps one questioning his 
conscience whether or not it would be really murder 
to push the fellows off beneath the wheels. 

To add to the felicity of our high perchings here, 
the brindle-bearded fellow that sits upon the box 



OVER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 91 

was " held up " on his trip the day before ; his 
eighteen passengers getting out and yielding up, un- 
der the gentle persuasions of a brace of pistols, such 
little souvenirs as they carried with them. We are 
going over the same road with the same driver, who 
has a record of being the most-robbed driver on the 
line. There is little of the Pass of Thermopylae spirit 
about our company; in polling the passengers, not 
one gives slightest intimation tliat he prefers staying 
back as a dead hero to going on as a live coward ; 
and so thoroughly resigned are we to any arrange- 
ments planned by the " road-agents," that we verily 
believe a solitary man, with a stick, if only it looks 
like a gun, may capture the entire party. 

The journey lies along pleasant gardens, through 
which the water flows from the flumes upon the hills; 
snug cottages, vine-embowered, are beside the water- 
ways ; along the road are noisy teamsters breaking 
camp for the long day's journey ; and such pleasant 
odors come from grove and thicket as fill the world 
in the blessed morning of the day. The road soon 
rises in great upward reaches of the mountains. There 
is no sign of habitation now, except the little stations 
where we change the horses ; but the forest grows 
dense. As the hills lift up, great peaks come out 
in line, and on the summits that we cross the vast 
range of mountains stretches far away, while into 
valleys, thick-woven with the braidings of the forest, 



92 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

we look down. Scene succeeds scene while we toil 
upward in this clear air ; pleasant mountain-brooks 
are crossed, and were it not that now and then 
.great peaks come in view, we might think that 
we are only tramping among the old familiar New 
England hills; for the same flowers are blooming 
here, and in deep vistas of the woods we see such 
beauty of fern and foliage as we have seen in other 
places far away. 

The road is not all an ascending one ; down great 
pitches of the hills, holding on as best we can, the 
heavy stage goes into sunlit valleys, with ruined 
mills and little fields musical with the mower's 
scythe. Here branches off the old road across the 
treacherous ford, — not longer used because of the 
tragedy enacted there a year ago, — and then comes 
the final climb to the Great Divide which separates 
the waters of the seas. The road is now a spiral 
to the clouds, passing by a cliff of iron, and up by 
winding terraces, until at last we reach the summit, 
and tlie streams go westward to the sea. We are on 
the Pacific Slope at last, and below us are fairer 
valleys than we have seen, green with the baptisms 
of living streams, with cattle-ranges beside the road, 
and great-eyed oxen looking at us as we hurry by. 

Our forty-mile journey ends at Deer Lodge, and on 
the second day we move on towards Missoula, The 
deserted mine of Yamville is passed, with its old tra- 



OVER THE ROCKIES BY STAGE. 93 

ditions of millions filched from the desolation of these 
yawning gulches ; only the debris now is left, and 
over this the patient Chinaman is toiling, gathering 
up the shining fragments that are left. The town of 
Pioneer lies along the way, rich yet in gold, which 
these innumerable sluice-ways will separate from the 
sand. The water runs to waste to-day, for the miners 
have gone to the circus, twenty miles away. We are 
in the cattle-ranges once again, the long, rolling plains 
sloping upward into rounded hills, between which we 
can see great droves of cattle feeding. 

At sunset we come to the famous Hell's Gate, — 
a winding way hewn out from the mountain's side ; 
with mineral springs beside the road, and, fathoms 
down, the great noisy river with silent pools of black- 
ness beside the shore. There are long level stretches 
beneath broad-branched trees, wdth such clean, needle- 
covered soil as old groves have ; and then again the 
road winds up, looking across the chasm to sharp 
peaks, hewn into fantastic pinnacles, touched with 
such glory as the dying day can give. 

The sun is fully set when, with the tally of sixty 
miles behind us as the journey of the day, we stop at 
Kramers for our tea. It had honorable record in the 
old days ; but with the going of the stages the occu- 
pation of the inn failed, and we are set to sup upon 
the scraps left over from the feasts of other days. 
We have thirty miles yet before us, and we shall 



94 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

be fortunate if we reach our destination before one 
o'clock. The road has been heavy, and the dust and 
heat intolerable. 

A construction train is just behind the house, for 
the railway coming from the West was built here a 
week ago. The train goes down in an hour's time 
to Missoula, and we will go over to the Chinese camp 
and wait, letting the stage go on, in hopes that w^e may 
find easier transit. We smuggle ourselves on board 
the caboose of the returning train. We have sailed 
in mid-ocean with less tossings than we now experi- 
ence, for the road is unballasted as yet, and before us 
are the flat cars on which the rails are brought ; so 
that the frequent stoppings of the train, for caution's 
sake, are like " the wreck of matter and the crush of 
worlds." There is a most unsavory smell within the 
car, for supplies for the laborers are brought in it 
daily up the road, while Irishmen and Chinamen, 
Greeks, Barbarians, Scythians, bond and free, are 
crowded here, going down the line. It adds slight 
comfort to tlie journey that the light goes out just 
when a spreading rail detains us for an hour. We 
have seldom seen so weird a night as this, here in the 
deep defiles, with the workmen's torches flaring at us 
in the darkness, and the noisy river murmuring we 
know not how far below. 

A single lantern now burns within the car, chang- 
ing with its flickering light the strange inmates into 



OVER THE EOCKIES BY STAGE. 95 

grotesque forms; the chattering of a dozen dialects 
long since has ceased, for the night is wearing on half- 
way to its close. We have found a little spot on the 
contractor's dining-table where we can sit, sandwiched 
between a Chinaman and a native of the Emerald 
Isle. They treat us kindly; for in the bouncings of 
the journey, so often as we are thrown upon them, 
they are never angered ; and when tired nature seeks 
to "knit up the ravelled sleave of care," and in 
one undistinguished and indistinguishable mass we 
lie prostrate together on the table, we have rarely 
had — either because of weariness or the friendliness 
they bear us — more quiet bed-fellows. 

So we finish the passage of the Eockies ; not quite 
as we had dreamed in our plannings of the trip, but 
in easier fashion than if we had kept upon the stage, 
which, by reason of a fallen tree across the road, only 
finds the journey's end at daybreak. 

We never learn what time it is when we come to 
the final stop. We only know that the international 
league upon the table goes to pieces at the first shake 
of the brakeman's hand, the Chinaman and the Irish- 
man withdrawing from the triple alliance, leaving us 
as best we can to get awake and find shelter for the 
remaining hours of the night. The train stops short 
a little of its final halting-place, for the brakeman, to 
quicken us, cries out, "We only stop ten minutes 
here." Our scattered wits must be getting back, for 



96 K AMBLES OVERLAND. 

we remember, as we scamper down, the old story of 
the desperado in tlie early days, who, being placed upon 
his mule, and told that he had just fifteen minutes in 
which to leave the country, quietly remarked, "Gents, 
if this mule don't balk, five will do." 



ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 



Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, 
Save its own dashings. 



Bryant. 



CHAPTEE VI. 



ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 



FEOM the western gateway of the Eocky Moun- 
tains at Missoula to Portland, Oregon, is upwards 
of six hundred miles. 

Leaving the mountains, the road passes soon into 
the Coriacan Defile, crossing the fearful span of the 
Marent Gulch over a trestle bridge eight hundred 
and sixty-six feet in length and two hundred and 
twenty-six feet in height. The road winds on along 
the faces of the hills, coming soon to the Jocko Eiver, 
in whose pleasant valley for sixty miles the Flathead 
Indians have their reservation. These natives are 
peacefully inclined, having long ago yielded to the 
civilizing power of the Jesuits. Eiver after river 
now is passed, the great ranges of the Bitter Eoot 
Mountains always in the west, until at last the splen- 
did stream of Clarke's Fork flows beside the track, 
giving for miles every variety of pleasant scenes. 

We have passed now into Idaho, having reached 
the most northern point of our journey. It is a nar- 
row Territory, however, in this, its northern part, only 



iOO EAMBLES OVEKLAND. 

sixty miles in width ; but it has within it Lake Pend 
d'Oreille, one of the fairest lakes upon the continent. 
The track crosses the little estuary of the lake which 
runs up to meet the waters of Pack Eiver, on a bridge 
a mile and a half in length, and then for nearly twenty 
miles winds along the lake's northern shore. The 
mountains rise grandly around the lake, thick with fo- 
liai^^e of fir ; bold islands are within the waters, show- 
ing no trace that ever a Iniman foot disturbed their 
solitudes. The lake itself is beautiful, winding in and 
out among the hills, opening long vistas of pleasant 
river-like reaches of rippleless water. So for sixty 
miles the great lake hides for the coming people its 
rare surprises, rivalling our own Lake George in the 
beauty of the encircling hills and the serene loveli- 
ness of its pleasant waters. The shore is pebble- 
covered, like the beaches of the sea, strewn with sun- 
bleached timbers, and fragjments of such rude boats as 
the Indians have made. Forest fires are raging on 
the mountains as we skirt the lake, patches of flame 
set on the faces of the cliffs making weird illumination, 
and sendinor out their clouds of smoke to drift above 

o 

the waters of the lake. 

The road winds southward now : the Spokane Val- 
ley is entered, and over the boundary line of Wash- 
ington Territory we pass. The reservation of the Coeur 
d'Alene Indians is close at hand. The natives here 
on the western coast are of milder temper than far- 



ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 101 

tlier east, for they have yielded more readily to the 
civilizing influences of the Catholic missions, which 
have cared for them. A facetious writer gives as 
proof of the civilization of these natives the fact 
that " they sell their wheat for cash, and that the 
old chief, Sulteas, has a pair of well-matched horses 
for his carriage, and lets his money at two per cent 
a month." 

The Snake and Columbia Eivers meet at Ainsworth, 
where we cross the river on a ferry. At Wallula 
Junction the Walla Walla liiver joins the Columbia, 
and our journey noAv will lie in the valley of this 
river. Yet not in the valley, for it has no real valley, 
as its waters are walled in by mighty mountains, and 
along the sides of these, on shelves and ledges, around 
out-jutting points, we shall go down towards the sea. 

There is little fertility here, the desolation of the 
desert is around us ; but there are massive sculptur- 
ings of rock and crag, and such mighty headlands as 
keep wonder all alert. The stone has crumbled into 
every fantastic form, while the great river below bears 
on its burden to the sea in mighty currents, hemmed 
in by crag and cliff. The Great Dalles of the Co- 
lumbia are reached in the progress of our journey. 
Only yesterday the salmon season closed, and the 
town is alive with men. Fishermen, speculators, 
tourists throng the hotels, and as the great train 
noisily pushes through the town, crowds look upon 



102 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

it, waiting for transit down the line. The place has 
many curious sights, the new and old intermin- 
gling. Here in the old days the emigrant to Oregon 
halted his tired horses and embarked for easier prog- 
ress on the river, and here too the new life of recent 
enterprise has found a place for its successful ven- 
tures. 

Mount Hood, crowned with snows, raises up its 
kingly .head eleven thousand feet, while the great 
river, compressed here in narrow channels, surges 
between its imprisoning walls. The scene is one of 
rare sublimity, for the shores furnish, with their black 
cliffs, fine setting for the angry waters, while over all 
the great mountain raises its majestic summit, looking 
down serenely on the wild passion of the river's flow. 

If we could but call forth the strange adventures 
witnessed here, a narrative might be written before 
which romance would seem dull, for this has been 
the battle-field of the men who contended for the 
empire of the West. The Jesuit Fathers have sailed 
these waters, and while we glide along beside the 
river we can see upon the other shore the breaking 
up of the Indian encampments. The fishing season 
has closed, and from the settlements among the 
mountains the women have brought down the 
ponies to carry back the braves who have gathered 
here supplies for the coming winter. Long reaches 
of placid water follow, alternating with rapids ; the 



ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 103 

great cascades of the Columbia are passed, the train 
noisily thundering beneath the cliffs, shooting through 
dark tunnels, to come out into new surprises of forest, 
cliff, mountain, and the enchanting river carrying 
its majestic waters half a thousand feet below our 
flying wheels. Down the cliffs, too, come great sprays 
of water, and deep defile and gorge lead backward in 
the hills ; and there are traces of abandoned mines, and 
little cabins where the miners dwelt, with now and 
then a half-clothed savage, in defiance of the law, fish- 
ing upon the river's bank. 

The track now diverges from the river, and, trailing 
through the forest for twenty miles, we come into the 
fair valley of the Willamette Eiver; and here before 
us, across the river which floats the ships of every 
nation, is Portland, the metropolis of the Pacific 
Northwest. It has rare advantages of situation. 
Oregon with its vast resources pays its tribute here, 
and from these channels the great wheat-laden ships 
sail to every port. It has a population of nearly 
forty thousand, with streets of metropolitan breadth, 
great wholesale houses, street-cars, public buildings 
of generous proportions, an enterprising local press, 
and all the advantages that Eastern cities have. 

We have reached now the western limit of our 
railway ride. Here we take steamer for San Fran- 
cisco, and at midnight are on the "Queen of the 
Pacific," ready for our early morning voyage. An 



104 K AMBLES OVERLAND. 

hour's sail brings ns to the confluence of the Willa- 
mette with the Columbia, and on the larger river for 
eighty miles and more we sail to Astoria. The river 
is sombre in this early morning light, for the great 
hills on either side are clothed with forests ; even 
the little islands are closely woven with the dense, 
dark foliage. Now, indeed, we realize the meaning of 
the " continuous woods where rolls the Oregon," for 
no villages cluster on the shore, nor pleasant farms 
relieve the sombreness of the unbroken forests. How 
grandly moves this mighty current ; how wide it 
spreads in opening bays ; how impressive are the 
solitudes of river, island, and the ever-present forests ! 
Here is the old burial island which used to be the 
sepulchre of the dusky • nation that lived and loved 
beside these waters ; here are the places where battles 
have been fought, and these hills have given back 
other echoes than the shrill scream of our steamer's 
whistle ! 

The city of Astoria is curiously set upon piles, as 
though, with an unsettled empire behind it, there were 
need of thus filching from the sea a place for the 
city's site. The place w^as founded by the great fur 
company, and has had a strange and eventful history. 
It has grown but slowly, for until the building of the 
railway this wondrous region was but little visited. 
The salmon industry now is making strange activity, 
there being more than fifty canning establishments 



ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE. 105 

here. We visit tliem and all the wonders of the 
place. The town is still crude, and bears but slight 
evidence of wealth ; but the great shi^^s lie without in 
the harbor here, and in these crowded streets one 
feels the beginnings of the larger movement that is 
to change the old city into a place of thriving indus- 
tries and commerce. 

When the tide covers the bar to sufficient depth, 
we cast off our lines and leave the continent behind. 
The great headlands come in view, Cape Disappoint- 
ment holding bravely up against the encroaching sea. 
The ship passes out of the river and is on the Pacific. 
For two days we sail upon its placid waters, no 
sail relieving^ the cfreat wastes of water, nothinsr seen 
except the sea-gulls and the drifting weeds. The 
sun sinks with glory in the sea, and the balmy night 
reveals the stars above and the long starry way trail- 
ing behind our advancing keel. The air is fresh with 
the breezes that float above the sea, tempered, seem- 
ingly, with perfumes from invisible islands of fra- 
grant woods ; the forest fires are burning along the 
coast, and the vast ranges which would bear us com- 
pany are hidden behind smoky veils. But the 
ship drifts on, and here before us are tlie shores of 
the golden State, and here, rising like sentinels guard- 
ing priceless treasures, are the double cliffs of the 
Golden Gate. It is not wonderful that the old voy- 
agers passed up and down, never dreaming that this 



106 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

narrow gateway opened into an inland sea so fair as 
this beside whicli the great city has built itself. Were 
not these mountains veined with gold, this entrance- 
way would still hold worthily its royal name ; for it 
is of surpassing grandeur, the rocks themselves bold, 
sea-scarred, holding up their defiant ramparts against 
the sea. The bay beyond cannot surely find — unless 
it be in Naples — any rival in the world ; island-dotted, 
spreading out its blue waters like a sea, with pleasant 
shores set thick with towns, and on the heights the 
magic city of San Francisco, with its vast multitude 
of buildings, and over all the solitary cross of the 
burial-place, standing clearly outlined against the 
cloudless sky. 

We can hardly realize that we have reached the 
wonder-city here upon the western borders of the 
continent; that California is before and the Pacific 
behind us. So, wondering at the strange life around 
us, we come down the gangway, feeling, as the throng 
of hackmen importune, that after all we are yet 
upon the earth, although so severely do they press us, 
we have grave doubts how long we may be permitted 
to tarry in the flesh. 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 



There's something in a flying horse. 

Peter Bell. 



CHAPTEPw YII. 

THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 

EO]\IE has the advantage of San Francisco on 
the score of age, but the newer beats the older 
city in the number of its hills. While "Jerusalem 
is a city that is compact together," this one sprawls 
from the Golden Gate half-way to the Sierras, — a 
kind of miscellaneous go-as-you-please sort of a 
place, that looks as if it had at first been built out 
of plumb, and by a series of earthquakes had been 
still farther kinked and twisted. The hills are real 
up-and-down sort of things, cut decidedly on the bias, 
crossway, sideway, endway, angleway, anyway, run- 
ning up, looming up, any-way-to-get-up, made of 
sand which is so generally in a state of flux that a 
man hardly know^s the next day on which street to 
look for his corner lot. The houses hold on to these 
side-hills by some indescribable suction, and it is said 
that the feet of the people, before the coming of the 
cable roads, so slanted by the climbings of the hills, 
that on level ground they had to walk upon their 
heels. 



110 E AMBLES OVERLAND. 

Shanty and villa intermingle, the houses of the 
rich and poor meet together ; and ambitious architects 
are the makers of them all. The newer buildings 
are of imposing magnitude, of great solidity and 
grace ; the homes of the millionnaires are palatial ; 
but the general aspect of the place is that of a lack 
of architectural character, a city where every man 
owns a jig-saw, and is the architect of his own house 
if not of his own fortune. 

An old South Jersey friend used to say, " Our land 
here is valueless, but our climate is worth a thousand 
dollars an acre." The average San Franciscan keeps 
discreet silence of the city's soil, but the climate is a 
constant theme for wonder, love, and praise. And 
yet the weather is as uncertain as the fulfilment of 
Vennor's prophecies. Summer is in winter, and cold 
weather comes in the hot months. About eleven 
o'clock in the morning the zephyrs begin to put the 
hills in circulation, and the entire unimproved estate 
of the city is up in air. The wind is a kind of mar- 
row-searching affair, severely gritty, a trifle salt, and 
sure to make itself at home in the defective tissues. 
And yet these people with chattering lips will chant 
the praises of the balmy air, while the zephyrs make 
havoc in the streets, and there are fires in half the 
city grates. 

We have told the truth, but not the whole truth, 
about this sandy soil. There is some latent power 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. Ill 

in these grains of sand which the California water 
finds, for wherever the magic water touches it the 
desolation changes to luxuriance. The city in many 
of its parts is a garden ; tiny yards are like little bits 
stolen out of Eden, with velvet lawns kept green with 
daily waterings, and clambering vines covering porch 
and trellis. In the flower season the city must be 
like an Oriental fair, for here are fuchsia bushes like 
lilac trees, and great tangle braids of vines that must 
take on bewitching beauty when the flowers come. 

We can believe the wonders that they tell us of, 
for in the great park we visit we see some of the 
marvels born from the marriage of this strange soil 
and the miracle-working water hidden in the hills ; 
and even now, when the year wears its russet livery, 
we get hints in the belated blossoms of what the city 
must be, 

" When spring unlocks the flowers to paint the laughing soil." 

This is the way we see the city. In the Nevada 
Stables there is a horse, the fairest, rarest horse man 
ever sat upon. Our good fairy tells us where to find 
him, and he knows that we are coming, for he dances 
with joy to see us ; and how glad he is all through the 
day that we have come to ride him ! The genial Willis 
used to say that " there is nothing so good for the in- 
side of a man as the outside of a horse ; " and so do 
the Arabs have love for it, that they have an imme- 



112 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

morial proverb, that " he who forgets the beauty of a 
horse for the beauty of a woman will never prosper." 
But there are horses and horses, and who can tell, by 
looking, the fashion of a horse. Even so wise a man 
as Sforza used to say, that " should one desire to take 
a wife, to buy a horse, to get a melon, the wise man 
will recommend himself to Providence, and draw his 
bonnet over his eyes." 

Bat we know by that instinct that creatures some- 
times have that both horse and rider have met one of 
the epochs in their lives, and the great splendid ani- 
mal is so royally glad that we have come that he is 
impatient to bear us over the hills and far away in 
such an exultant race as we have never Imd in all 
our life before. 

Oh, but it is a wondrous seat that we have found, 
— a very battery of electric force ! We can feel be- 
neath us the dancing of every nerve, and how airily 
this matchless creature bears us, as though he carries 
Csesar and all his fortunes. We wear our honors 
meekly as lie bears us througli the crowded streets ; 
we have just a touch of hope that those who watch 
us are giving not all their admiration to the horse ; 
although so do we love it that we cannot be envious 
if we would, and secretly we know that we are not 
half so superb an animal as this that carries us. 

But here is Nobb Hill, half a thousand feet above 
us ; and how can this fellow bear us up this semi- 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 113 

precipice of plank ? Ah, we little know him ! We 
loosen our reins just the tiniest bit ; and away, up 
and on, he springs, as though life had no joy so great 
as climbing to the clouds. We have come far to see 
these palaces of the bonanza kings, and really we 
must insist, now that we are here, on looking for a 
moment ; for how can we tell now that we may not 
some time be millionnaires ourselves ? — and it will 
be handy then to know what things to do. So, despite 
the protest of our horse, — though the feet dance, and 
the curb is flecked with foam, — we spy out the won- 
ders of the palaces. They are vastly large- a very 
efflorescence of tower, turret, balcony, and portico, 
an epidemic of ornament, as though the jig-saw, being 
a plebeian fellow, had a kind of communistic hatred 
for the millionnaires, and had wreaked wild vengeance 
on their dwellings. We dare not say how much these 
pretentious buildings cost, knowing that we shall 
surely miss half the figures ; we are certain, anyway, 
that the wall around the terrace on which this one 
rests cost a quarter of a million, and, as the humorist 
said of his frog, we couldn't see any points about 
that wall any more than any other wall. 

We begin to grow suspicious that in other days 
our horse has carried some hoodlum rider to the 
Sand-lot meetings ; for where can we get, other than 
from him, the strange, protesting feeling that these 
dwellers here should have such palaces, when there 



114 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

is such poverty just below the hill ? It does not seem 
quite fair that there should be such inequality ; and 
as we look across the bay to where the prison is, and 
think of the convicts there busily working for the 
State, and then at these palaces, of the monopolists, 
we confess that we have a kind of hoodlum feeling 
as we listen without protest to this old saw that our 
horse repeats to us : — 

" The law locks up the man or woman 
Who steals the goose from off the common, 
But lets the greater villain loose 
Who steals the common from the goose." 

Of course we will not countenance any such heresy, 
and we tell him to go on and mind his business ; but 
as we go along we secretly think there is good " horse- 
sense" in what the fellow says. 

Far off on the hills, set against tlie sky, stands on 
the summit of Lone Mountain a wooden cross. Far 
out at sea we saw this thing towering weirdly, like a 
second Calvary, above the city of a hundred hills ; 
and now we will go upward to where the cross, in its 
place of graves, keeps its eternal vigil above the am- 
bition, the shame, and virtue of the city. Down, up, 
over the hills, by pleasant homes, touching the rude 
fringes of the town, we come up to the city of the 
dead. Close beside it is Laurel Hill, beautiful with 
ivy, with no sign in outward glory of shrub and tree 
that there are graves beneath these scarlet and pur- 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 115 

pie flowers. We can read here the story of yonder 
city's life. The pioneers were buried beneath these 
wooden slabs. How rudely they are carved ! The 
weather has almost stained out the little record of 
their lives. This is the end, then, of the adventurous 
lives of the bold men who came over the plains and 
by the highway of the sea to plant here a new 
empire ! How familiar are the names on these old 
moss-grown stones, — Providence, Newburyport, Bos- 
ton, New London, Salem, Gloucester, New Bedford ! 
All of these w^e read as the birthplaces of those who 
once were clothed in the dust moulderincr beneath : 
and our journey through these silent cities, whose 
dwellers never move, tells us many things of the 
old life of this strange city of the Golden Gate. But 
here we are far above the city. 

San Francisco is upon a tongue of land running up 
to the mountains, between the bay and the sea. On 
the seaward side the hills as yet are but sandy dunes, 
bearing only such faint trace of softer life as comes 
from little patches of wiry grass. But here below is 
the city. Its squalor is hidden from this height, and 
one cannot tell now that there are any shadows of 
poverty and ugliness to temper the brightness of 
the place, sleeping in its magic loveliness below. 
But our eyes will not linger long on any city, when 
beyond there is such a bay as this. Why is it 
that they never told us that Naples almost had a 



116 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

rival here ? True, this is a State that has within its 
borders 

•* Awful Shasta's icy shrine ; " 

it is the land 

"Where a wind ever soft from the blue heaven blows. 
And the groves are of laurel, and myrtle, and rose." 

In its great forests 



t> 



while 



" Aged trees cathedral walks compose,' 

"Afar the bright Sierras lie, 
A swaying line of snowy white." 



But even such opulence cannot afford to leave out of 
its catalogue of beauties so fair a thing as the bay of 
the Golden Gate. How vast it is, running from the 
sea far into the valleys of the mountains ! A thousand 
navies here can ride at anchor ; it is an inland sea, 
fair with islands, set round with hills; with white 
towns nestling on its beaches, and great rivers com- 
ing down like azure streams to join an azure sea. 

These hills beyond are wonderful for one who has 
the inner sense to see the colors that even a tree- 
less soil takes from the sun. They are such heights 
as old Spain has; and, unless the deceptive air is 
cheating us, there are winding roads going upward 
in curious spirals to the sunny summits. And if 
we will only shut our eyes a little and let busy 
fancy do the seeing, there are quaint cities there 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 117 

with walls and gates ; and underneath, rude fishing- 
towns, quaint with cabins huddling by the cliffs, and 
old fishers' boats spread over with nets drying beside 
the beach. 

There are pleasant towns upon the other side: 
Alameda, Saucelito, San Quentin, San Eafael, Vallejo, 
Oakland, with its great pier running out a mile or 
more, the fair Nappa valley, and beyond all the great 
peaks of the ever present Coast Kange. 

How fair the city is upon this cloudless day ! Its 
spires and domes are not so lofty as many other places 
we have seen, but this is a city builded 

" Like Aladdin's tower, — 
Begun and finished in an hour." 

Our own short life more than spans its history, and 
lo ! here float ships from every land, here are the 
smoke of forges ; it is a city of factories and shops, a 
hive of industry, rich with art, glorious with achieve- 
ment, bright with promise ! 

Westward now to the sea we go, great wastes of 
sand around us, with now and then a cottage embow- 
ered in vine and foliage, and over on the hills the 
great white fence enclosing the vast area of another 
city of the dead. 

But this grand fellow beneath us has a native's 
pride in this fair city, and whispers that he has more 
in store for us ; he has caught, too, the briny smell 



118 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

of the Pacific, and if we will only please let up a 
little on the lower reins that hold the curb he will 
not say a word about the others, but will become the 
winoed Pes^asus bearino" us to the sea. We try to 
chide and tell him more than once that we are known 
at home as soberly inclined, and ask him what would 
Mrs. Grundy say if she saw such mad John Gilpin 
racings out here across the continent, so really it will 
never do ; and so we "kinder" keep him down, though 
because, perhaps, we are not over strong, our muscles 
would fail a little on the straight roads beyond the 
houses, while a thousand times we say, " Was there 
ever such a horse?" And there never was. We 
are at the Cliff House now, and our good horse whis- 
pers to us, " You just go round and see the seals, and 
I will wait here underneath the sheds and bolster up 
my breath to show you what I can do on the park 
road home." 

So we stand on the balcony of the hotel and look 
out on the great rocks, and the uncouth seals, and 
the innumerable sea-gulls ; the great ship with every 
sail set, bound for the portals of the Golden Gate ; 
the great illimitable sea, and somewhere out in the 
west the King of the Cannibal Islands, of whom we 
used to think in boyhood much oftener than now. 
The rocks here are broken into most fantastic form, 
massed together in splendid piles, black like ebony, 
and draperied with black sea-weed floating with the 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 119 

surging of the tides. The surf-men are dragging up 
the life- boat from the beach, for this quiet sea has its 
angry moods ; and beside the rocks a pleasant road 
winds downward to the sand, and upward to the park 
and onward to the city, miles away. 

A sea-horse must have been the sire of this fellow 
that carries us, for the sea breezes have seemed to 
put a thousand fires within his veins. Our remon- 
strances are vain, and the sign-boards of the park, 
threatening every kind of fine for intemperate speed, 
are without avail. What can we do, anyway, now 
that we are on, but keep on, if we can, and go with 
him to the city prison, to bail him out, if they will 
thus suffer atonement for the breaking of the city 
ordinances. 

Men look at us and wonder; fat dowagers drive 
under the shelter of the hills to give us all the road ; 
the policemen hide in the bushes, that they may not 
see a crime they cannot punish; while we go on 
towards the city with lightning speed, anxious of 
course to go with dignified sobriety; but we can't. 
By the awful monstrosity of the new City Hall, an 
architectural nightmare in poor brick; by the vast 
Catholic College; on to South Francisco; along the 
water front ; down the outside and up the centre, in 
the old country-dance fashion, — so we see San Fran- 
cisco, If we should give the names and number of 
the buildings, its population, history, peculiarities, 



120 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

we should doubtless filch from the guide-books the 
essential facts ; and we have no heart to take from 
our readers what rare pleasure there may be in steal- 
ing from first sources. 

The Chinese Quarter, of course, must have a word 
of notice. Here is a segment of a Chinese city. The 
stores are veritable China-shops, — tiny, decorated with 
all sorts of fantastic tea-chesty, fire-crackery kind of 
ornaments, looking like the pictured Chinese junks 
stranded in the San Francisco streets, or a multitude 
of transplanted pagodas. The stores are orderly ; the 
little markets scrupulously neat, containing such little 
messes of curious vegetables as a picnic party of dolls 
might wish. The streets are filled with natives, — 
orderly, civil, not handsome, quiet, sober. We do 
penance for an hour at the Chinese theatre. The 
Chinese are not a histrionic people. The dramatic 
instinct is not strong. They are not, if our observa- 
tion serves, "children of song." We should not select 
a boiler-shop if we needed the solace of music ; we 
should prefer it, however, to a Chinese theatre. The 
tin-pan serenade of a bridal couple in a country town 
is like a symphony compared with the music of a 
Chinese orchestra; and we are confident that nowhere 
on the earth, or in the sea, or in the waters under the 
sea, is there such " confusion worse confounded " 
as at the Chinese Opera on one of the full-dress 
nights. 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 121 

There is no curtain, no scenery, "no nothing" ex- 
cept noise. The orchestra is on the back part of the 
stage, pounding away for dear life : cymbals, drums, 
fiddles with one string, and that the squeak one, 
banjo-looking instruments of torture, a miscellaneous 
lot of articles by courtesy called musical, in the hands 
of a lot of able-bodied laundrymen, every one of 
whom is contributing to the general agony. The 
men smoke, have their hats on, stop to chat, light 
their cigarettes, exchange places, go out, and visit 
round generally, oblivious of the plot, — though there 
is no plot except to make all the noise they can. 
The supe walks around, waits till the actors get up, 
takes away the seats, leans against the walls, lights 
his cigarette, makes himself generally at home. 
Spectators go at will on the stage, and there is a 
kind of unconventional free-and-easy abandon to the 
performance, that would be exhilarating if our heads 
were not breaking with the pressure of the noise. 

The actors are well dressed, though we cannot say 
that we are partial to the Chinese costume. Their 
speech is a kind of prolonged soliloquizing, uttered in 
a kind of falsetto key ; it has this advantage, that a 
little of it goes a good way. We should have been 
satisfied if, like George AVashington in the story, we 
had simply walked up and then walked down again ; 
and while there are dissipations that we may repeat 
in the unfoldino- of our life, we are certain that our 



122 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

curiosity concerning Chinese dramatic art is satisfied, 
— in fact, more than satisfied. 

San Francisco is a city of hotels. The Palace is, on 
the outside, an arcliitectural patchwork of bay win- 
dows ; the building within is set round a large open 
court covered with glass. The building cost seven 
millions, and is the largest in the world. Hotel life 
is in great vogue with the people here, and quite a 
fraction of the population can be found residing in 
the great public houses. 

Among the pleasant and profitable things to do in 
the city is to visit the rooms of one of the great pho- 
tographers. We select Taber's, the leader of the art 
on the Pacific Coast. Nowhere, unless it is in Venice, 
can there be such pictures painted by the sun ; for 
nowhere has art attained greater perfection, and no- 
where is there finer atmosphere than this. All the 
wonders of California are here, — a rare artistic in- 
stinct selecting just the one right spot for the picture, 
and then doing the mechanical work with the enthu- 
siasm of an artist rather than the unthinking formal- 
ism of an artisan. The wonders we have seen are 
revived by these matchless pictures, and in these 
images of the new wonders yet awaiting us we feed 
anticipation. 

The city, we think, is w^orthy of its location, and 
destined to achieve a splendid career. The people 
are outgrowing the evils peculiar to their early days. 



THE CITY OF THE GOLDEN GATE. 123 

Municipal wealth will come, and with it the adorn- 
ments that wealth procures. These things we believe. 
But we know that the horse which now rests from 
his labors in the Nevada Stables is the best horse on 
the continent ; and had we been taxed, on our return 
from the exploration of the city, the sum of all our 
assets, we are certain, with the hero in the Irish play, 
who was threatened with a year's imprisonment for 
his stolen ride, we should have exclaimed with him, 
" Faith, and it was worth it ! " 



THE APPROACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 



What thy soul holds dear^ imagine it 
To lie that way thou gost. 



Shakspeare. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE APPROACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 

ONE hundred and fifty miles from San Francisco 
is Madera, and ninety miles from Madera is the 
Yosemite. 

The railroad takes us to the former place, and 
forty-one horses take us to the valley. The coach is 
an open one upon the sides, slanting at the ends in 
chariot fashion, like the band-wao^on of a circus, but 
covered with a light top of leather, and fairly hung on 
the old-time thorough-braces. The seats are like the 
old sittings in the Litchfield meeting-house as de- 
scribed by Mr. Beecher, having no softness except 
such as you carry to them, while the backs reach up 
their sharp edges just high enough to catch the 
weakest vertebra. However, not a word shall we say 
against this matchless ride. The equipment is superb ; 
strong, fleet, well-groomed horses, an unequalled road, 
and such a driver as we never had before. 

All day long, up hill, down hill, the steaming 
horses go, the long lash cracking over them, while, 
clincfing to seat and iron rail in the wild excitement 



128 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

that rapid motion gives, we are carried on towards 
the happy valley. 

We are fortunate in the passengers that are to be 
our companions for a week. An ex-member of the 
Legislature of the Empire State, whom we early call 
the Senator, full to the brim of old scraps of college 
songs, with no small wit at anecdote and story, — a fel- 
low of infinite jest, mingled with such good sense as 
is seldom mixed in the composition of the ideal " good 
fellow ; " the Secretary of the Grand Encampment of 
the Knights Templars, which meets during the coming 
week in San Francisco, — a college professor before 
he became a scribe, with pocket full of such decora- 
tions as the Sir Knights like to wear, and many curi- 
ous experiences tucked away in his knightly head, 
which will naturally be shaken out in the ups and 
downs of the journey of the week ; an engineer from 
Iowa, who in Mexico is making fame and fortune ; a 
banker, who, though fresh from Ohio, neither holds 
nor desires an office ; a dry-goods merchant, also from 
Ohio. There is also a venerable Texan judge, with a 
tall hat much the worse for wear, — a man full of legal 
lore, mingled with poetry, an enthusiast in all the 
wonders of the road, guarding as best he can the 
daughter that accompanies him, the only lady in this 
company of men. A neighbor of the judge's is jour- 
neying with him, — a most irrepressible young man, 
most unaccountably skilled in law for one whose head 



THE APPEOACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 129 

is crammed with all the songs ever sung upon the 
minstrel's stage ; a most susceptible young man, who 
manages, by such shifty tricks as lawyers somehow 
learn, to always have the judge and the judge's daugh- 
ter with him on the seat, quite content to have the 
father on the outer side, where the bulk of his atten- 
tion must perforce be given to keep himself from 
falling out and his hat from falling off. 

There are lots of places worse fitted than a four 
days' ride for entrapping the love of a confiding girl. 
There are so many attentions that a lone maiden 
hungers for on a stage journey, such marvellous 
opportunities for those endless questionings which 
belong to woman, so many places of danger where a 
strong arm is needed, that we do not wonder that the 
young lawyer gradually changes the young lady's 
aversion to regard, — this regard subsiding on the re- 
turn trip into solicitude, and in the last stages of the 
journey into love. 

The course of true love does not always go smoothly 
even on a stage. The old judge, in the intervals of 
guarding his hat, is wont to rouse himself and come to 
the protection of his daughter, when the artful lover, 
with matchless skill, winds the old man up on the oft- 
repeated stories, calling out, with such dissemblings as 
lovers have, the well-worn anecdotes, until, wearied 
with protracted speech, the old man forgets his wari- 
ness and turns his exhausted faculties to the task of 

9 



130 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

guarding his much-battered hat from the perils of the 
roof. The dry-goods merchant, too, is a thorn in the 
lover's side. He is a dashing kind of fellow, and it is 
natural that the judge's daughter — being a woman, 
and therefore human — is not going, without a struggle, 
to become the af&anced of this persistent lover. We do 
not think the merchant really loves her, — we half sus- 
pect he has a wife at home, — but he has that rare win- 
ning way, that gentle deference that comes perhaps 
from the business that he follows, but which at any 
rate is most beguiling to a woman. And then the 
passengers are pushing the fellow on; making little 
conspiracies in the stables where the horses change, 
putting together combinations to slip the merchant in 
the lawyer's place, urging on the not over-ardent rival 
on the ground of public duty, and then watching in a 
kind of careless fashion the legal Caesar sulking in his 
tent, while on the seat behind the merchant whispers 
to the maiden such pleasant nonsense as men have 
always used since Adam wooed Eve in the groves of 
Eden. 

So through the journey there is this little romance, 
— a gentle girl and a gallant youth, learning, by that 
tender tutelage that love knows how to use, to change 
each other from common beings into idols ; the 
maiden urging on a lover's lagging steps by pleasant 
little coquetries, trying to cheat herself with little 
resistances, yet leading him on all the while. So 



THE APPROACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 131 

the old, old story is repeated, until, when the journey 
ends, the young lady, 

** Tying her bonnet under her chin, 
Ties a young man's heart within." 

The morning air is most delicious. We pass over 
barren fields into pleasant woods, with such frequent 
change of team as keeps the wheels, up hill and down, 
flying fast beneath us. We stop for dinner at Coarse 
Gold Gulch, where, not many years ago, a little band 
of miners took out in ten days ninety thousand dol- 
lars' worth of gold ; but as they took it all, there is 
no occasion for us to stop beyond our dinner, and so 
we go on, through the pleasant defiles, beside noisy 
streams, with little touches of pastoral scenery close 
beside the road, and, as we wind over the summits, 
magnificent outlooks of vast range and pleasant val- 
leys. 

At Fresno Flats we find a pleasant village among 
the hiUs, and from this on the road is almost ideal 
in beauty. We have to pass yonder range of moun- 
tains ; but so marvellously have these road-builders 
planned, that the grade is such an easy one that, 
beneath the cracking of the whip, the horses with 
gentle, easy trot carry us to the summit, miles away. 
In the greater wonders of the vaUey, visitors are 
apt to forget the beauty of the approach. The jour- 
ney is long, the sun is hot here among the hills, 



132 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and there is that expectancy that hinders admiration. 
But the road all the way is a delight, — winding over 
the hills in such graceful spirals, opening such vistas 
of enchantment as make the days, despite their weari- 
ness, memorable in the panorama of delights they 
give. More than once we are on great summits with 
lordly mountains looming up ; little vales of Arcadian 
loveliness are entered, and just in the soft gloaming 
of the day we come into Fish Camp, a tiny valley 
set round with hills, with such soft, lawn-like turf 
and shapely trees as we thought could be found no- 
where else upon the earth outside of the English 
parks. The long road, too, is set round with inimi- 
table decorations. The fields are brilliant with flow- 
ers, — the old familiar daisies of the field, ferns with 
rare delicacy of spraying branch, shrub and bush as 
white as if frosted by the snow of a winter's day; and 
everywhere we see the wonderful manzanita, so 
curious in its bark of maroon velvet, so gnarled and 
twisted, besetting us behind and before, that we come 
at last to have most tender love for this peculiar 
shrub. So the day draws on, each hour unfolding 
richer beauties. 

Now, farewell to fields and woods ! We are in the 
California forests. The light is soft now, filtered 
down to us through branches a hundred feet above 
our heads. Truly did the old artists get from forest- 
trees hint of the Gothic church, and easily can we 



THE APPROACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 133 

now believe that " the groves were God's first tem- 
ples." How majestic are these miglity pines ! clean 
of bark, broad-rooted, as they have need to be to carry 
to the clouds such massiveness of bulk ; with great 
cones of green absorbing the sunlight a hundred feet 
above us on the pendent boughs. We are now in the 
region of the Mariposa Pines ; just beyond, not many 
miles away, are the monsters that were growing here 
beneath the sierras before the white man's foot 
touched the shores of the New World; and these 
great columns that bear up the leafy arches of this 
doubly consecrated temple have stood here ages upon 
ages. Almost in silence we pass beside these mon- 
archs of the woods, looking down into pleasant vistas 
paved with such rare mosaics as the sunlight gives 
when broken by the branches ; while 

** Filled is the air with a dreaming and magical light ; and the 
landscape 
Lies, as if new-created, in all the freshness of childhood." 

Our driver will leave us at the end of the day's 
journey; but before he goes he will show us how 
cunning is his skill. The last stage of the drive is 
but four miles, on a down grade all the way, full of 
curves and twistings, — a mountain road running 
above deep ravines, with no intervening rail or fence. 
With foot set upon the brake, with such volley of 
speech and lash as these Jehus know how to give. 



134 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

the six fresh horses are started on their mad race ; 
the coach sways, as it whirls around the narrow 
curves ; straight down into the ravines we look, we 
dare not say how far; but on we rush like the 
wind, clinging to rail and seat, every muscle of the 
driver tense, and the horses wild with the excitement 
of the race. So we come to Clarke's, with sixty miles 
behind us as the journey of the day, and when we 
stand upon the platform we find that we have made 
the last four miles in a trifle less than seventeen 
minutes, which is not bad travelling for a public six- 
horse stage. 

From Clarke's we make detour by special coach to 
the Big Trees. There are eight distinct groves of 
these giants in California. The Mariposa Pines are 
six miles or more from Clarke's, on an altitude as 
high as the summit of Mount Washington above the 
level of the sea. These trees are set apart by Gov- 
ernment for perpetual preservation by the same grant 
that gave the Yosemite to the State of California. 
The trees number three hundred and sixty-five. They 
are stumpy in appearance, having rich brown, spongy 
bark; some standing alone, others in groups. The 
Grizzly Bear is the largest, having a single branch 
six feet in diameter. Twenty-two of us, with wide- 
extended arms, and hands joined together, are neces- 
sary to encircle it ; and we have paused in our writing 
to measure the red ball of twine we carried with us 



THE APPEOACH TO THE YOSEMITE. 135 

and stretched around the tree. At the risk of being 
called a second Ananias, we give the measurement as 
eighty-six feet and eight inches ; although, if any of 
sceptical tendencies doubt, we will not insist on the 
odd inches. We drive through one, Wawona, — it 
standing directly in the road, — and we are able to 
get coach and four horses all within the tree. These 
monsters are impressive things, vaster than we have 
dared to dream ; but curious as it seems, they do not 
impress us with such sense of majesty as the more 
graceful pines that yesterday we passed, set in such 
beauty in the inimitable forest, with its lights and 
shadows. 

Twenty-five miles now will bring us to the valley. 
We have left the lordly pines behind, but there are 
other wonders along the way. Steep climbings on 
mountain sides, new spirals winding up, great valleys 
dark as Erebus, and, nearer yet than we have seen, 
the vast sierras outlined against a cloudless sky. 
Should we turn back now, without the vision of the 
valley, we would be content ; for all along the way 
there has been such shifting visions of delight as have 
made the journey easy, and now we are drawing near 
to the holy place ; even now we are on the rim of 
the valley, and behind the veil of woods the wonder is 
concealed. By brook and under overhanging cliff, 
above the precipice and the dark foliage below, we 
come on and down ; great peaks and domes spring 



136 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

into view ; the wheelers circle round a ledge of rock ; 
the motion ceases, for this is Inspiration Point, and 
there beneath us is Yosemite, — the fairest, love- 
liest valley that God has placed on the whole round 
earth. 



THE YOSEMITE. 



Where'er we tread, H is haunted, holy ground, 

Byron. 



CHAPTEE IX. 

THE YOSEMITE. 

WE shall not attempt the impossible task of de- 
scribing the Yosemite. Had we ever dreamed 
that any pen could so fashion words as to give even 
an imperfect picture of this fair valley, the dream 
flees when from Inspiration Point we look down into 
the enchanted land. 

We are on the rim of the valley, and all its loveli- 
ness lies half a mile of sheer descent below us. The 
valley itself is a picture of enchantment. Through all 
its tiny one-mile breadth there is an intermingling of 
forest and meadow, green fields and darker shade of 
shrub and tree ; while through all its little six-mile 
length the gentle Merced flows in such enticing 
windings as never wayward water found before. 

On the journey hither, we find that the summer's 
drought has parched the fields, and they are sere and 
brown, but wet with the baptisms of these mist- 
wreaths hanging like draperies from the sky ; watered 
by the ever-flowing Merced, no gardens in fabled 
Arabian tales ever were clothed in robes so green. 



140 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

The royal picture has more than royal settings, for 
it is framed in such majesty of mountain, dome, pin- 
nacle, and peak as nowhere else surrounds so fair a 
spot on earth. And upon all this — the river winding 
amid sunlit meadows, the intermingling field and 
forest, the mighty cliffs lifting their Titanic masonry 
half a mile upward to the clouds — the eye rests from 
this mount of vision. 

The descent to the valley reveals, from every one 
of its innumerable windings, a varying scene. El 
Capitan becomes appalling as we come near to the 
level on which its great bulk rests. The Cathedral 
Spires seem as though beneath them there must be the 
mighty arches of the temple which they crown, while 
from the summit of the valley the great Domes dis- 
pute empire of this kingdom with El Capitan, sitting 
through the ages here, with the Merced singing at 
its feet. 

We will not profane this place by our petty meas- 
uring-rods, nor even attempt to give the catalogue of 
wonders ; there is not in mere height or bulk grandeur 
or beauty, and it is mockery to prattle of names and 
dimensions when we are beneath the overshadowing 
of Omnipotence. Travellers have written that not at 
once does the Yosemite impress itself, — that one 
must wait in silence hours and days, until the spirit 
of the place weaves its magic fascinations around the 
soul. There is needed for us no such waitings for the 



THE YOSEMITE. 141 

spirit. The illimitable majesty of rock and cliff, the 
sense of immeasurable height, awe the soul, while 
the inimitable beauty of meadow, stream, and forest 
changes awe into an adoration that subdues speech, 
and fills the heart with such nameless rapture as 
music sometimes brings. Twice before have we felt 
that sudden hush of life, as though the inward spirit 
was awed to silence in the presence of Omnipotence : 
once, when we stood upon the platform in the forest 
and saw the wonder-gorge of the Yellowstone, with its 
majestic sweep and its transcendent colors ; and again, 
when, at Canterbury, we stood in our first cathedral, 
and heard the music of the choir chanting the evening 
prayers. 

We have no heart for any human fellowship in our 
communings with the spirit of Yosemite. The pesti- 
lent guides seek to force us to vulgar explorations, 
seeming, in their bargainings, like those who once sold 
doves within the precincts of the Temple ; but we will 
not see the holy place profaned by a showman's babble, 
and so we let the tourists all drive off, while alone we 
sit and watch the meadows and the hills. 

There is a time in a summer's day when the light 
is soft and tender, its glare is gone, its heat burned 
out, — a kind of Indian summer of the sun ; and when 
this comes, we saunter out to meet the spirit of the 
place. We have open doors and windows for it, and 
with the first step upon the meadow it enters in and 



142 GAMBLES OVERLAND. 

possesses us all through the blessed hours. We cross 
the Merced upon the bridge, and, turning down the 
valley, pass the gypsies' camp, and saunter towards 
El Capitan. No living thing in all the valley has 
dwelt among these cliffs so long as this river here, and 
we know that in all these years it must have learned 
where the largest beauty lies, and so we will follow it, 
rather than the highway that man has made. And 
the gentle Merced never betrays us in all the journey 
of the day. We follow all its windings ; but so does it 
sing to us along the way, uncovering its shining peb- 
bles, displaying with every artless ripple its grace of 
motion, that we have no heart to chide it, though it is 
leading us by tortuous windings into the darkness of 
the night. 

We are drawing near El Capitan. How wonderful 
it is! Is there anywhere on earth a wall of stone 
with such Babel aspirings to touch the skies ? Is it 
the light softening the stone, or such tempering of the 
granite as the waste of ages brings, that makes the 
massive rock wear a kind of tenderness as though it 
were the friend and not the enemy of man ? Were it 
not that there is this hint of something that in living 
things we might call pity, this vast massiveness would 
repel rather than charm, as now it does. But the 
Merced whispers to us, " Look at me, I am the inter- 
preter of El Capitan ; " and there in its placid water 
we see the mountain, with every grace of drooping 



THE YOSEMITE. 143 

line, with every soft weather-stain and arabesque of 
fire, frost, and sun, canopied even in this magic 
mirror's face with the rare tapestries that the dying 
sun loves to weave. 

This is the El Capitan that we will carry with us 
through the years, robbed by the Merced of not one 
cubit of its height, changed by no deception, bearing 
every scar and trace of sorrow left by the travail that 
gave it birth, but somehow glorified, as the Lorraine 
glass transforms the landscape ; in some such fashion, 
as we have only clumsy wit to tell about, interpreted, 
as the master painter, giving to his picture all that 
nature gives, adds to it what nature lacks, — a trans- 
forming soul. 

From the river, now let us go up and face the 
mountain. We will sit here and trace the mighty 
wall, inch by inch, four thousand feet to where it 
holds the old sky up. The eye climbs on and on ! 
Will it never reach the summit ? How broad it 
is, and what folly is it for this puny creature, sitting 
here upon these bowlders, which the mountain has 
hurled down and never missed, to be attempting 
with such poor things as human words to describe 
such wonder as El Capitan ! We have seen in our 
journey along the Merced no human being; but now, 
just as we are in the forest, we meet two stalwart 
Indians, naked to the waist, of such hue as a bur- 
nished shield of bronze might have. So into the 



144 EAMBLES OVEELAl^D. 

experiences of this rare siimmer's walk in Yosemite 
there enters this human element, which adds to 
our remaining journey such romance as busy fancy 
weaves, as we walk along in the gathering twilight. 
Oh, but it is rare sight to see the sun kiss good-night 
to these great peaks ! The lesser ones are earliest 
touched, as children first are put to rest ; and then 
one by one the higher peaks are kissed asleep, and the 
shadows of the valley have company in the mountain's 
shades. We are far away now from our shelter for the 
night; the Merced must be crossed before we can 
return, and there is yet no sign of bridge, and here 
in the forest already the darkness comes. 

But what matters it, so long as nature is making, 
all for us alone, such transformation scenes. We 
have never seen before that night comes on with 
such glorious pomp, and we must hereafter notice, if 
in any other place, night comes to its sovereignty 
with such ostentation. 

We are facing now the rare peaks upon the 
Merced's other bank; the vast bulk of El Capitan 
is behind us, but here are sharp spires, like the 
Aiguilles that sentinel Mont Blanc, springing up 
and up, as never temple spires towered, and yet 
carved in such symmetry as Strasburg's spire never 
had. While we stand in the darkness, awed by 
these, a faint light gilds the crest of Cathedral 
Eock, and soon, in its fair centre, there is set the 



THE YOSEMITE. 145 

crescent of the moon, poised with such faultless 
evenness as a cunning craftsman might use in set- 
ting jewel in the centre of a crown. We are in 
the midst of marvels, and shall not wonder, whatever 
happens ; but while the light hovers there, we can but 
ask ourselves by what right of conquest the Crescent 
rather than the Cross is placed upon this temple not 
made with hands. 

We have crossed. the Merced now, and are home- 
ward bound. There is no sign of light, nor any 
sound of wheel or human voice ; but there are such 
rare odors as the woods distil beneath the gentle 
pressure of the darkness, and such tender whisper- 
ings as the pine-trees give when the day is dead. So 
we come homeward, silent and alone, — yet not alone, 
for the moon makes such little light that there is 
faintest shadow of human form, as though our spirit 
is disembodied and walks beside us, or as if the spirit 
of the valley is giving us guidance home, while through 
the meadows the gentle Merced winds along, cheering 
us in the darkness with the 

"Beauty born of murmuring sound." 

Eight behind our chamber window all night long 
stands the old Indian Loya or Sentinel, a single shaft 
of rock, symmetrical as an Eyptian obelisk. Take 
the tape-line in your teeth and climb this pillar, and 
hang the line upon some rocky splinter on the sum- 

10 



146 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

mit of the spire, you shall measure off the tally of 
three thousand feet before your work is done. JSTo 
other peaks save El Capitan divide supremacy of 
height with this eternal sentry, while in simple grace, 
in light and airy pose of station, it has no rival in 
this fair valley. 

We steal off alone, to make, in the early morning, 
pilgrimage to see the sun paint the picture of the 
mountains in Mirror Lake. The landlord uses every 
art to dissuade us, fearing, with such solicitude as we 
can easily interpret, that we shall be unable, without 
serious fatigue, to make on foot the journey. But we 
have come across the continent to see this Yosemite 
in the way we best love ; so in such delicious morn- 
ing air and light as belong here we make our pilgrim- 
age. Following up the Merced's trail to where it 
leaves us to climb into the mountain, across the fields 
by little pasture paths, in and out among the rocks, 
we come at last to the little lake. 

The North and South Domes are above this moun- 
tain tarn, while towering over all, ten thousand feet 
above the level of the sea, is Cloud's Eest, the defiant 
Jove in this pantheon of the gods. 

The way has narrowed now, and if we will make 
further exploration we must turn back and go east- 
ward into the valley out of which the Merced comes. 
But we will not go till we see the fashion in which 
the sun leads his armies to the conquest of Yosem- 



THE YOSEMITE. 147 

ite. Above the eastern Dome, Tisayac, already there 
is the orange tinge which colors the liveries of the 
heralds that go before the king ; the mountain's crest 
is gilded now, the gold changes to a flaming fire, and 
out of the fire comes the king to rule the day. Mean- 
time on every peak the courtiers stand, crying " The 
king has come ! " The sun's banners are hung every- 
where on cliff and peak ; the very woods are driving 
off the shadows that inhabit them ; the Merced's rip- 
ples glisten like the silver scales of a knight's armor ; 
the night has gone, and above Yosemite 

" Jocund day- 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops." 

Shall we stand here and watch Tisayac, the god- 
dess of the valley, taking her morning's peep into the 
mirror of her chamber ? Even the goddesses may 
have the pleasant vanity that lesser beauty is dow- 
ered with ; and modesty and prudence, too, tell us that 
man's clumsy vision had best not see how tenderly 
a beauty rising from her sleep first pays tribute to 
herself, nor learn the cunning arts by which even a 
goddess, before her mirror's face, fashions her beauty 
for the tribute of her worshippers. 

Backward now a little way, then eastward into the 
canon from which the Merced flows, we will go up 
to the sources of the river, far beyond the forests, 
toward the mighty peaks. 



148 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

There are steep climbings in the way, and we put 
beneath us the four sure feet of one of the poor mules 
doomed by some irony of fate to endless service in 
Yosemite. He does not greet our coming as tired 
watchers hail the day, nor rejoice as a strong man to 
run a race ; we know that he has been in hiding, that 
he might escape us, — for the guides tell us that these 
fellows even climb the trees to hide from their tor- 
mentors : but we try and tell him that we are not to 
blame for his misfortune, and that if he will safely 
carry us, keeping silence of all his troubles, we will 
give him such decent treatment as he never had; 
keeping silence, too, of our own misfortunes, and 
showing him how wondrously kind, even in Yosem- 
ite, w^e can be made by a fellow-feeling. 

The Appian "Way never had such wondrous things 
beside it as ornament the simplest mountain-path 
that trails through a forest to the clouds. We have 
seen on nameless New England hills such marvels of 
mossy rock, such entrancing lights and shades, such 
forest architecture and leafy decorations, as have 
changed weariness to delight, and transformed a 
pathway to an upland pasture into a highway to 
the chambers of the gods. 

But all the wonders are not here beside the path : 
we are climbing into an amphitheatre set round with 
such sculpturings as Omnipotence carves when it 
would make a masterpiece. Liberty Cap, the Half 



THE TOSEMITE. 149 

Dome, before ; the mighty wall of Glacier Point be- 
hind; beyond, the fair valley; around, marvels of 
forest, cliff, and waterfall. It is all wonderful, in- 
describable ; majestic strength married to majestic 
beauty. 

We have come to the great wall of stone which 
makes a barrier to advance ; and over this, six hun- 
dred feet, comes Nevada Falls, one of the grandest 
cataracts the world contains. The settings are of 
incomparable grandeur; for the Cap of Liberty towers 
over it, and the wall of stone, down which the torrent 
falls, is such a one as Titans might build to guard 
their citadels. The water comes over the crest with 
great, forceful might and volume ; angered with inter- 
posing obstacles, it breaks into little petulancies, — 
bursting out in passion freaks, stormy froth and 
foam, but, changing speedily into pleasantness, it 
weaves itself into such magic lace-work as water 
never fashioned elsewhere in the world, while in 
very ecstasy of power it toys and plays with the fall- 
ing water, tossing it as a magician's balls, and chang- 
ing it by some rare necromancy into mist and vapor. 

Downward into the valley a mile or more the 
water, having rested in the journeying, leaps again in 
Vernal Falls four hundred feet. It makes the spring, 
not only because there is no other pathway to the 
sea, but in sportiveness as well ; for do we not see, 
when we come below, the rainbow-ring which the 



150 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

fairies hold for it to jump through, if it can ? But 
so does the water forget the taunting of the fairies, 
and stop to braid its lace-work fashionings and weave 
its gossamers over all its journey down, that it misses 
the golden ring which the fairies hold, — unless, per- 
haps, they with naughtiness have turned the golden 
ring aside, that they might laugh at the discomfiture. 
The ride homeward brings relief to the long tension 
of the day's admiring. We have left behind — ungal- 
lant fellows that we are ! — the bedraggled women who 
kept us on the upward road, conscious of the misera- 
bleness of life. They were strangers to us ; but this 
is no excuse for lack of service. They were not 
beauty incarnated; but women cannot all be fair, 
and we think the little remnant of the conscience 
that yet abides with us would have made us reason- 
ably attentive, for duty's sake. But when upon a 
mountain path one is sandwiched between a dowager 
long gone forty, fat, too, though not fair, and a maiden 
not yet forty, though neither fat nor fair, and the shut- 
tle of an endless prattle is flying back and forth beside 
our ears all through the weary climbings of the day ; 
when, too, we are half the time dismounting to fix 
girt and rein, to pick up shawl and wrap ; when in the 
endless gettings down we have to catch good armsful 
of perspiring beauty, and in the gettings up to lift 
with most muscular gallantry these fair creatures, 
with scream and ejaculation, smothering all the time a 



THE YOSEMITE. 151 

wicked swear behind a smiling face, — it is not won- 
derful when, by some good ordering of our fates, 
we chanced to be ahead on the downward road, that 
with whip and spur we should have fled like new St. 
Benedicts, leaving the ladies far behind, to wreak their 
prattle on the guide, who, being a bachelor of years, 
doubtless needed such grace as comes from woman, 
whom, the poet says, 

*' Nature made to temper man." 

Away from the mountain, we are now on the val- 
ley road which goes beside the Merced homeward. 
There has been no chance upon the mountains for 
such exhilaration as rapid riding gives, and so now 
in mad racings we go down the valley, forget- 
ting the decorum which belongs to men of age and 
soberness. 

The more active of our party are with us now : the 
Reporter, mounted on a spiteful mule called Jesse 
James, most curiously ornamented with a tail haK- 
shingled in double flounces ; another, riding the mate, 
though not banged as the namesake of the bandit ; the 
mule we ride is fashionable in color, being of the old- 
gold shade, but having the quintessence of all the lazi- 
ness ever given to mules since the world was. We have 
not sounded yet the depths of his depravity ; so when 
one of the youngsters of the party drops behind and 
mildly asks us to take the part of prompter in a little 



152 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

panorama planned, we readily assent, desiring in good 
faith to do our humble part. 

The conspiracy is this. The Senator is making his 
first equestrian ride this day. He is of the long and 
Cassius kind of men, whose legs were somewhat over- 
done by Nature, leaving slight residue of matter with 
which to make his body. He is by no means dispro- 
portioned, except when mounted on a horse ; and then 
it is simply honest candor to say that he does not look 
like a centaur, — animal and rider one, — as perhaps 
those of us mounted on the mules appear. He sits, 
or, perhaps to be more accurate, is folded, round a large 
brindle-shaded horse, not over-sanguine in his temper- 
ament, though one cannot always tell what latent 
traits may be developed even in a horse under provo- 
cation. Whenever this piebald brute essays to trot, 
the Senator drops the reins and clings to the saddle's 
pommel, beseeching us that we go slower, as becomes 
a senator who has never before been astride a horse. 
The young men suggest to us that they would get 
themselves on each side of the Senator, and we should 
come close behind, and then at a given signal we 
should start the cavalcade in such mad flight as whip 
and spur could give, each helping, as he could spare 
belaborino's from his own horse, to uro^e on the Sena- 
tor's steed, which, by reason of being the larger animal, 
and the rider's hands being occupied, would doubtless 
need such help as we could give. 



THE YOSEMITE. 153 

We do not remember at this writing just the things 
we said to break up the conspiracy ; we know that it 
struck us at the time that we had a most excellent 
place, as we rode behind, to see the celebration, and 
that, so far as whip and spur could help us, we would 
keep as near the festivities as might be possible. 

With a mad "hurrah !" the young men start, deliver- 
ing every alternate stroke upon the towering horse on 
which the Senator all unconscious sits. The maddest 
gallop now takes place; the Senator clinging with per- 
sistent grip to mane and saddle, the tormenting youths 
applying whip, and laughing in wildest glee at the 
tossings of the victim of their sport. But the old 
piebald is warming with the fires of other days; the 
boys have need of all their energies upon their own 
beasts, for the Senator is far ahead, riding in such mad 
speed as the old mare has not made for twenty years 
at least, while despite the endeavors of the boys, urged 
on, too, by the taunting derision of the Senator, the 
twin mules stagger on in the proverbial discomfort of 
a stern race. 

We, at least, have easy conscience; not by one 
stroke do we urge on the assailed steed, for despite 
such thrashings as we never gave or took before, 
we cannot keep within gunshot of the flying crowd, 
finding only such consolation as comes from a con- 
science void of offence, and the elaboration of the 
hypothesis, that while the old-gold shade is in good 



154 RAMBLES OVEELAND. 

form as a color, it is not favorable to high speed in 
mules. 

We do not like to say a word against either a 
bridge or a mule that has safely carried us, but we do 
not think that we are treated quite with fairness. 
The other boys, dismounted, are on the piazza when 
we arrive. The entire company of the hotel are with 

; them, too. We plan to ride to the platform and give 
our mule to the boy in waiting to take to the stable. 
But the mule has his own private plans. He is no 
stickler for forms, and has no preference for the boy 
over his present rider. He bolts for the stable by a 
short cut. Our own plan is to let him go, but the 
entire company derides us. 

We then try to coax or drive him to the steps. 
But, no, though we stop him, so often as we pull he 
turns his long face round, laying his appealing nose 
upon us, while his feet beneath, without the diverg- 
ence of a hair, keep right on toward the stable door. 
We manage, under the spur of the derision of the 
company, to even get him pointed toward the house ; 
but the rascal is a double-actioned fellow, and is going 
backward in the direction of his crib. The strategy 
of a leader sometimes rises in emergency : we let him 
go, steering him as best we can, until at last we have 
backed him up against a huge tree, which holds him 

I fast. We have stopped him ; but this is not victory. 
The taunts come thick and fast from the hotel, when. 



THE YOSEMITE. 155 

elated by our partial triumph, we steer him off from 
the place where he is stranded, hoping now by some 
favoring tack to fetch the stoop. But the mule has 
the courage of his convictions, and steers straight for 
the stable door, and were it not that a friendly hostler 
catches him at the threshold, we should not now be 
living to tell the tale of our discomfiture. 

We cannot describe all our hours in Yosemite. 
We have no space to tell of the rare beauty of the 
Bridal Veil, the Merced's meadows, the vast peaks, 
the thousand fascinations of the enchanted valley; 
and had we space, our words would only be a wit- 
ness against us of the folly of an ambition that dares 
to describe what is indescribable. 

We will go out of the valley by the way of Glacier 
Point, which is up these walls three thousand feet. 

Oh, but it is a rare walk we have in the Indian 
summer of the day 1 Every peak and waterfall, the 
winding Merced in all its length, are here before us ; 
and each terrace that we climb, and every point we 
round, and every little summit we surmount, is a 
place of revelation. So upward, five miles or more, 
we go on this blessed summer's day, coming to fairer 
loveliness with each advance, wondering how Nature 
can surpass this scene, and yet finding at the next 
turning of the road that even Nature can outdo her- 
self So we come to the very tabernacle of the Most 
High,- 



156 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

** Mounting, to Paradise 
By the stairway of surprise." 

Not once, but many times, do we stand that night 
on the dizzy height and look down into the valley, 
sweep the heavens with our vision, and see with what 
audacity the great peaks have almost finished the task 
of reaching heaven which the babel-builders left in- 
complete. We look eastward to the great cleft in 
the fairest mountains on the continent, where N"evada 
and Vernal Falls make the sources of the Merced's 
loveliness. We watch the sun go down ; we see over 
the Sierras the sun rise to give the world another day, 
and through the night such glory as we never expect 
to see again upon the earth. 

And now the hour of parting comes, and as guilty 
mothers who desert their children kiss them in their 
cradles and flee away, so while yet the darkness rests 
upon the valley we will whisper peace and farewell, 
and hasten from Yosemite. 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 



And I said, " If there's peace to he found in the world, 
A heart that was hiimble might hope for it here^ 

Thomas Moore. 



CHAPTEE X. 

THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 



PASSADENA. 

IN the plannings of our trip, nothing held greater 
place than the sunny orange-groves of Southern 
California. Some one has said, " There is a wild man 
sleeping at the bottom of every drop of blood in hu- 
man veins ; " and we are certain of it, for we have 
strange love for vines and flowers, the tangles of un- 
tamed woods, and most devoutly hold that next to a 
little child a tree is the fairest thing God ever made. 
There is no spot in Europe so beautiful as the plains 
of Lombardy, between the alabaster spires of the 
Cathedral of Milan and the Alps. Patient industry 
has softened the ledges into soil, and the fruits of 
every zone have changed the fields into a magician's 
gardens. The orange and lemon, great thickets of 
oleander with spikes of pink like flames of fire, the 
darker cypress, laurel, and myrtle, all are here, and 
the tourist walks among them with wondering appre- 
hension lest the conjuror's spell will break and the 



160 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

fair vision pass away. The Alps brood over this scene, 
and above the twining vines of this delicious region 
there is the subtle tropic air which makes the days 
spent on the shores of Maggiore days of enchantment. 
Southern California in many ways rivals this fair 
spot in Italy. The mountains are here as they are 
there ; not lofty like the Alps, nor covered with eter- 
nal snows, but scarred with such traceries as old Time 
makes. There is lacking, too, the subtle charm of 
water, which, Goethe says, *' is to the landscape what 
the eye is to the human face ; " but there is here the 
same luxuriance of nature, the splendor of the same 
foliage, the same grace of color, the magic of the same 
sensuous, dreamy atmosphere. Nature is prodigal of 
her favors here, and it was not wonderful that under 
the shadow of the old Spanish missions there should 
have been distilled out of this perpetual sunshine a 
dreamy life, lacking the high endeavor nurtured in 
fields where Nature more niggardly guards her riches. 
It is a land almost of eternal summer, and here be- 
tween the sea and the mountains is the place 

" Where Winter keeps watch and ward, 
With Summer asleep at its feet ; 
Stands guard with a silver sword. 
Where the Junes and Decembers meet." 

There is something, too, in these pleasant names of 
Los Angeles, Passadena, Sierra Madre, San Gabriel, 
akin to the fair names of Baveno, Pallanza, Fariolo ; 



THE OEANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 161 

and these orange-groves and vineyards, the ranches 
where the shepherd tending his flocks lazily watches 
for the far-off islands of the Pacific, the pleasant 
nooks where the hee-farmer lives among the flowers 
watching the gathering of the honey, seem not unlike 
the things of which Yirgil sang in his old pastorals. 

The city of Los Angeles has many curious things 
for one who will get beneath its outward New Eng- 
land bustle, and find the old flavor of its Spanish 
life. There are quaint buildings of the old Mission 
days, streets where the Spanish names, half-faded out, 
are still upon the battered adobe walls ; and in these 
crowds which throng the sidewalks one sees the pe- 
culiar type of Mexican face, and the quaint dress of 
the Southern nation that once ruled here. 

We have little love, however, for the cities that lie 
along the way. They differ in outward details, but the 
places of business have essentially the same life. 

We have come to see the Orange Groves. We will 
take a span of horses in the lightest buggy we can 
find, that we may make long journey and catch the 
exhilaration that comes from rapid flight. There is 
rare charm about this morning air, and our gallant 
steeds are entering jubilantly into the glory of the 
journey, and we can almost feel — in the quivering of 
the lines and the exultant pride with which they bear 
us — that they know they will give us rare surprises 
before the stars come out. 

11 



162 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

The way is dreary at the first, for the dust is thick 
and the fields are parched, the watercourses every- 
where are dry, and the cotton-woods that are sheltered 
in the little gulches are gray with dust, like olive- 
trees. 

We rise to higher levels, and here before us are 
the wonders we have come to see. What has hap- 
pened to the soil ? It has changed from a desert to 
a garden ! Orange, lemon, apricot, walnut trees, so 
lustrous in their rich greens, set in such long lines 
that one can look as through a- vista into fairer fields 
beyond. 

We have read somewhere that these long lines 
grow monotonously weary with continuance of seeing, 
and that the brown earth beneath robs, by contrast, 
the trees of loveliness; but we only see the trees 
themselves, smooth of trunk like young apple-trees 
in a New England orchard, — a little short, perhaps, 
for perfect symmetry, but wondrously fair, with their 
deep, rich foliage starred with golden fruit. 

The mountains always are in sight ; the road winds 
upward to pleasant slopes, from which the great val- 
ley running to the sea is seen ; in the zanjas, or irri- 
gating ditches, the water flashes, as though from the 
mountains a stream of diamonds floated down to 
adorn the orange-trees ; the tiny cottage of the small 
farmer, the semi-palatial residence of the rich, are set 
backward from the road in the midst of flowers and 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 163 

clambering vines; the workmen are making little 
trenches beneath the trees for to-morrow's watering, 
and beside the road hedges grow, and flowering 
plants, in the full luxuriance that comes from the 
magic water flowing at their feet. This is Passadena, 
the paradise of fruit and flowers. 

The Sierra Madre Mountains through the ages 
have sent down their soil to make these fields, and 
from the mountains comes the water that has changed 
this desert to such beauty. These orange-groves, the 
flowers that girdle these little homes, these vineyards 
bending now with the coming vintage, all have come 
from " the rivers which run among the hills," making 
Passadena, if only it had the old associations of other 
lands, hardly less fair than the towns of Northern 
Italy. 

But our pleasant musings here beside the orange- 
trees are interrupted. The road is hard as steel, and 
so smoothly roll our wheels along, and there is such 
exhilaration in the air, that when our bay and sorrel 
at the pole stretch out a little, just to try their paces 
on the Passadena boulevard, we have no sort of heart 
to restrain their racings, but let them go in mad John 
Gilpin flight, confident that somehow we can ride as 
fast as they can carry us. 

We have just finished a little spurt like this, and 
have come down to such steady, even-goings as is the 
normal action of a livery team, when, without hint of 



164 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

warning, tlie horses loom above us, the carriage is 
climbing over and collapsing round us, while the 
nigh front wheel which has journeyed with us all 
the way is running off alone into the ditch to escape 
the catastrophe. We are tumbled up against the 
carriage side ; our companion rests serenely over us ; 
we cannot quite gather the reins to hold the horses ; 
and there is a kind of dancing, ominous motion in the 
sorrel's heels which does not please us, as on three 
wheels, with a tottering, swaying buggy, we try to 
extricate ourselves. 

The last spurt did the business for us; for the 
horses have not yet got wind enough to drag these 
frightened Yankees through the rest of Passadena in 
a three-wheeled buggy, and while the horses are hesi- 
tating as to whether it will pay to kick, in a kind of 
miscellaneous rolling out we disembark and place 
ourselves at their other end, where greater safety 
lies. 

There is nothing flattering to the pride of an ambi- 
tious tourist in being away from home with a pair of 
strange horses, and this kind of a tricycle carriage. 
Even the orancje-trees fail to fascinate. We hsh the 
stray wheel out of the irrigating ditch to find that 
the nut which holds it on is placed at the back of the 
wheel in place of the front of the hub, and only the 
blacksmith's wrench and file, a mile away, can serve 
us. So out into the Passadena dust we get, our com- 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFOKNIA. 165 

panion driving as the ploughboys do within the 
fields, and — shall we say it ? — we jogging on beside 
the treacherous wheel, punching it on with our guide- 
book whenever it shows signs of again " takino- 
water." 

We are now in sight of the little village, but have 
no heart to thus enter it ; and so by way of experi- 
ment we get into the carriage, hoping, when the wheel 
shows signs of coming off, we can stop, and from 
within pull or from without punch it on. 

So we come into Passadena, — not proudly as we 
had hoped, but with humility of spirit ; and while we 
cannot tell one word about the houses that are in the 
village, we can tell the number of the spokes, the color 
of the felloes, the full particulars of all the scenery 
of that detested wheel. The sooty fellow who serves 
us at the shop is laconic in his speech, for when we 
ask him, as we start, what we have need to do, he 
simply answers : " Drive slow, watch your wheel, and 
go back and give the owner Hades," — though he uses 
a different translation of the closinsj word. 

The Sierra Madre Villa is just under the shadow 
of the mountains, far up on the slope, with the great 
valley in all its loveliness spread like a picture at our 
feet. 

The house is owned by an artist, but is kept as a 
hotel ; it is beautiful in architecture, and surpassingly 
fortunate in its location. The view is matchless, — 



166 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

mountain and field, orcliard and vineyard, intermin- 
gling with far-off ranges, and fair trees shading the 
piazza where we sit. The honeysuckle covers the 
trellis of the house; a lawn kept green with flowing 
fountains is set round with flowering shrubs ; and 
here is fruit of every kind : the golden orange, the 
lighter-hued lemon, the purple fig, apricots, necta- 
rines, peaches, and such great clusters as the spies of 
Israel brought back from Eshcol. 

We take long siesta here, yielding to the seductive 
witcheries of this fair spot, — plucking golden fruit 
from greenest branch, robbing vines of delicious clus- 
ters, eating the rich, ripe figs from overhanging 
boughs, forgetting that even in this land, " in which 
it seems always afternoon," the sun will set and 
the darkness come. 

On the return ride we visit some of the great vine- 
yards of the San Gabriel valley, passing on the way 
thither from the mountain through pleasant avenues 
lined with the acacia, pepper, and purple eucalyptus 
trees. The Sunny Slope estate lies along the way, 
and we turn our horses into the .roads which wind 
over the twenty-three-thousand-acre farm of Mr. Eose, 
its owner. A company of Chinese laborers are busily 
preparing ditches for irrigation, working zealously 
with no overseer, as none is needed to make them 
faithful in their work. Here are sixteen thousand 
orange-trees, set in almost interminable lines, while 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 167 

eleven thousand vines helped to produce last year 
the grapes from which six thousand gallons of wine 
were made in the great distillery upon the place. 

The proprietor's son is glad to devote himself to us, 
taking us into every part of the vast buildings, show- 
ing us all the processes of distillation, and giving us 
pleasant narrative of the gradual growth of this great 
estate. His father was a teamster on the plains ; he 
had found but poor success in all his ventures, until 
he came here and planted his vines in the fields of 
this fair San Gabriel valley. New acres were added, 
and the little vineyard grew : a rude wine-press was 
set up, and wine was made ; and so each year had 
seen an enlargement of the estate, until now it is the 
largest, richest one in all the valley. 

We have been much interested, in our travels, in 
getting the opinions of the people regarding the value 
of Chinese labor. The Chinaman by no means is 
regarded with disfavor by all classes. Men of large 
business interests have spoken with enthusiasm of 
his work, saying that California is large debtor to 
him ; that without his labor its industries would be 
undeveloped, and to banish him now would be to 
demoralize and destroy half the business of the State. 
Seeing that Chinese labor is largely employed upon 
this estate, we ask our guide as to its efficiency. The 
intelligent man answers in enthusiastic praise of 
his workmen, " Without them we should be help- 



168 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

less. They are industrious, tireless, painstaking ; they 
never shirk; they need no taskmasters; they have 
intelligent interest in the employer's welfare ; they 
are careful in the use of tools, destroy little, and are 
always willing, reliable, patient." Asking him if 
they were cleanly in their living, he replies, " You 
shall see." And so he takes us to the house where 
fifty live, showing us the places where they eat and 
sleep. Long rows of bunks are around the building, 
with cleanest matting of straw for mattresses; the 
walls scrupulously clean; the floor is scrubbed to 
whiteness ; the kitchen is savory and sweet ; we lift 
the covers of the kettles upon the stove, inspect the 
pantries, and examine the food, to find everywhere 
surprising order and cleanliness ; while the stolid 
cook follows us with his half-opened eyes, wonder- 
ing: what business these straiiQ;e Melican men can 
have in thus inspecting the domestic economy of the 
Chinaman's home. 

At sunset we come to the old Mission Church 
of San Gabriel. It is of rude architecture, made of 
the rough adobe. Within and without it is poor, 
unsightly, poverty-stricken, having no other charm 
than that of age; and only with reluctance do we put 
the fee, fixed by the thrifty priest, into the hands 
of the withered has: who looks as thouo'h she has 
come up out of the old graveyard here to let us 
in, and w^hen she has fastened the weather-beaten 



THE OEANGE-LAND OF CALIFOENIA. 169 

door behind us she will crawl back again into her 



"O^ 



The ride homeward to the city in the early even- 
ing is full of beauty. The mountains hold the light, 
while yet here in the valley we are journeying in 
shadow. The magic water does not reach us here, 
and the fair orange-groves are left behind ; but there 
is witchery even in these bare fields of San Gabriel, 
now that the night is coming over them. Our good 
steeds snuff the stable now and catch already the 
glimmer of the city's lights ; and winding round 
the pleasant hills, sweeping with clattering hoof over 
the great plains, with steaming flanks, they bring us 
home, so filled with sweet remembrance of the day 
that we have not the heart to give the horses' owner 
the thing advised by tlie sooty smith who fixed the 
wheel in Passadena. 



II. 

RIVERSIDE. 

As yet we know nothing of Eiverside. Passadena, 
we have found, is divinely beautiful. This is a girl's 
adjective, but we stand by it. 

The people there are of gentle blood and culture, 
and when we asked them, with an honest wonder that 
seemed to please them, " Is there anywhere in Cali- 



170 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

fornia another spot so fair as this ? " they answered 
us, " No, there is nothing like Passadena, unless per- 
haps Eiverside may be compared to it." And so 
whenever we asked the question, so often we heard 
the name of Eiverside mentioned by these gently 
jealous rivals. 

We have a friend at Eiverside who has sent us an 
invitation to visit him, and so we will go southward 
sixty miles, and at Colton leave the road to visit this 
fair colony. We find our friend, and are led captive 
to " Cosey Nook Cottage," to find royal hospitality. 
'I'he house is the tiniest kind of a home ; its thresh- 
olds even with the ground, with a piazza around its 
little front and side, shaded with the graceful semi- 
tropic pepper-trees, wreathed round with vines which 
clamber over its front and around its sides. The little 
irrigating channel is just beyond the sidewalk, and in 
a day or two, a swift, clear stream will flow by all 
the trees, and make many rivers around the roots of 
the ten thousand flowers of this fair village. 

The house within is a thing of wonder, — rooms so 
tiny we wonder how any one can turn around without 
going out-doors, and yet somehow so elastic that once 
within there is abundant space ; ceilings so cosily low 
that one feels at once that here is home indeed ; and 
such curious halls and rooms and jjassage-ways out- 
ward to the orange-trees, such vistas, too, through the 
dark chamber of the long grapery stretching far away 



THE OEANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 171 

into the sunlight, that there seems to be an unreality 
about it all. There are no busy little fingers to med- 
dle with the various devices of a woman's ingenious 
hands ; upon wall and mantel everywliere there is 
woman's taste and genius beautifying the home ; and 
really we would like to put our shawl-strap around 
the cottage, and carry house, inmates, and clamber- 
ing vines away Avith us, setting them down in one 
corner of our city lot at home, that we might find re- 
freshment for our weary eyes, as through the autumn 
days we do our work at our study windows. We 
have not yet made ourselves accustomed to the lit- 
tleness ; and when to-day we all went out we could 
not refrain from charging our host that he carefully 
close the doors that the dolls might not get out. 

There are orange-trees around it, too, and a little 
vineyard, and from the pleasant hammock made of 
barrel staves, on which we took yesterday's siesta, we 
looked straight up into the broad-leaved fig-tree, and 
had but to reach upward to pluck the fresh, ripe, lus- 
cious figs. And then did ever mortal have such lux- 
uries : walnuts, peaches, fruits of every kind, grapes 
of numberless varieties, and roses of such delicate 
hue and odor, — all within the little orchard of this 
tiny house ? 

Thirteen years ago the site of Eiverside was part 
of the vast desert-like plains lying here in the sun be- 
tween the mountains. The town is situated between 



172 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

the Sierra Madre and the low Coast Eange mountains. 
It is in what is known as the Upper Santa Ana valley ; 
that is, on land drained by that river, although not 
really valley-land proper, the quality of the land being 
rather that of the mesas, a chocolate-colored loam, rich 
in oxide of iron, and formed from decayed vegetable 
matter and the granite wash from the mountains, — a 
soil peculiarly adapted to fruit culture. The moun- 
tain views are superb. Cucamonga, Grayback, San 
Bernardino, San Jacinto, are around the valley, mak- 
ing perfect frame for its fair beauty. Under the win- 
ter rains the fields became green for a little, but when 
the cloudless days came on, speedily the great brown 
mantle of desert waste spread over the entire scene. 
Brave men — a leader among whom was Judge North 
— came and saw how finely these great plains were 
sheltered by the mountain walls, and fancied, if they 
could but bring the water from the hills, they could 
change this desert to a garden. They found the 
springs of the rivers in the hills, and bravely made 
their ditches; carried on sprawling legs of timber 
their flumes across the valleys, and poured the might 
of water into the desert's lap. The soil laughed with 
flowers, the vine flourished, the almond-tree whitened 
in the sun ; and from old New England, and the later 
New Endand in the fair northwest, came colonists, 
not poor in purse or brain, but strong-handed, brave- 
hearted, large-brained men. They reared their little 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 173 

cottages, planted their vineyards, put in their seed- 
lings, and, digging their ditches, sat down to watch 
the miracle of the water coaxing from the soil the 
wonders of its latent life. The valley between the 
mountains smiled with beauty, and began to wave its 
orange plumes to the hills from whence came its 
strengtli ; the ditches were extended yet beyond ; 
others heard of the marvel here ; farther towards the 
mountains vineyard and orchard ran ; flowers were 
sown, trees along the way were planted, not for fruit- 
age, but for beauty's sake ; and wherever the magic 
water could be made to flow, there the miracle of 
growth was acted, until, after years so few that they 
are spanned by the memory of those who are but 
children yet, the place which was the valueless ranch 
of the herder has become 

" The land where the lemon-trees bloom, 
Where the gold orange grows in the deep thicket's gloom, 
"Where a wind ever soft from the blue heavens blows, 
And the groves are of laurel and myrtle and rose." 

Never did tourists journey with wider-opened eyes 
or with larger haste. How gladly would we loiter 
here and there, dreaming in quiet villages, musing 
beside the sea, waiting listlessly and aimlessly while 
Nature transfers to the canvas of our minds her mas- 
terpieces ! Of all the days spent in the Old World, 
none linger so pleasantly with us as those quiet ones, 
when for hours we sat and dreamed beside fair lakes 



174 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and in the midst of old historic scenes ; and it is our 
grievous misfortune now that for days and weeks to- 
gether we cannot loiter, dream, and linger, until the 
very life and atmosphere of the scenes we see shall 
become part of our very souls. And yet we are 
loitering here. We came for the interval of the 
trains ; we have passed the day, we are on the sec- 
ond day ; and so are the enchantments of Kiverside 
affecting us, that when we rose this morning, remem- 
bering the rare evening we had passed, sitting amid 
the roses in the dewless night, with the moon's 

" Level rays like golden bars," 

and looked out on a day so fair, seeing the world 

*' Smiling as if the earth contained no tomb," 

we were not surprised to find that the spur of our 
resolution had lost its power, that we no longer were 
solicitous for moving on, and without a word of pro- 
test, said, "Yes, we will stay another day," though 
we know that we must purchase staying by sacrifice 
of some wonder, for seeing which we have the ticket 
in our pocket. 

We can feel now, as we never felt before, the story 
of the " Lotus Eaters," who, under the spell of the 
delightful scenes through which they journeyed, for- 
got home and country, and were content to loiter 
ever in the lotus land. We have actually taken the 
pictures of our little family and placed them close 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 175 

beside us, to use them as a charm to break the spell, 
not only of this fair region, but of the fast-increasing 
friends who are weaving swiftly the enchantments of 
their hospitality over our poor yielding and delighted 
soul. Already fruit from orchard and field has been 
brought to us ; busy men have changed their plans of 
labor that they might w^ait upon us ; and not one, but 
many, have brought wdves and children to sit with us 
in the moonlight of these perfect nights amid the 
roses of the doll-house, which is our friend's home. 

We cannot understand how these fair scenes have 
come. Surely there has been some sorcery that has 
evolved these wonders, — trees of lordly girt, lawms 
green with a turf knit seemingly by years of growth, 
changing the plain into a vast park of many miles in 
area. The village is small : a few stores, churches, a 
public hall, a newspaper, of course, the matchless 
" Glenwood," a hotel superbly kept, a few homes set 
around with trees, — this is the village, though it 
should be said that there is within it cleanliness, 
order, and large sobriety. From the village out- 
ward are cypress hedges close beside the zanjas, with 
cactus plants and blooming flowers all along beside 
the road, and far extending backward row on row of 
orange-trees, — oh, so green and beautiful ! — hun- 
dreds, thousands ; with lemon, walnut, peach, nectarine, 
apricot, and pomegranate ; with great flaming plants 
and delicate roses round the houses, and such roads 



176 RAMBLES OVEELAND. 

and walks and long vistas among the trees as make 
one feel that these things are not for the occupation, 
but only for the amusement, of their owners. We have 
scant taste for details of figures : we only know that 
grapes are gathered by the ton, and oranges sent to 
market by the thousand ; that we have seen presses 
for the raisin, and have eaten muscats and muscatels, 
fig and peach and pear, until we shudder for the fer- 
mentation that will ensue when we strike the heat of 
the southern desert to-morrow on our journey. 

The land sold here only a few years ago for thirty- 
five, is now valued at a thousand, dollars ; and proba- 
bly in all the country there is nowhere so fair a colony 
as this, wrought out of the desert by the brawn of 
labor and the brain of intelligence. We have been 
charmed with the people we have met. Seldom have 
we seen keener men, full of public spirit, believers in 
the future of Eiverside, — men who have achieved 
something, and regard no obstacle as insuperable. 
Eastern capital abounds, and seldom has it happened 
when wealthy people have stayed for a time that 
they have not made their home here among the 
orange groves. 

We have written by our chamber window far into 
the night, and to-morrow at an early hour a new-made 
friend comes to carry us out, before the going of the 
stage, to pluck orange blossoms from the tree. Then 
onward to the desert, of which men have spoken with 



THE ORANGE-LAND OF CALIFORNIA. 177 

such words of pity. To-morrow night we shall be 
at Yuma, to which place, it is said, the dead natives 
come back from Hades when they are frozen out. 
Then on to Mexico for a little, thence to Colorado, 
and to the summit of Pike's Peak on a donkey's 
back, thence homeward once again. 

We draw the curtain ere we drop our pencil for 
one last look upon the beauty of this perfect night ; 
even the voices of the night are hushed, and the 
orange- trees sleep in the light without the rustle of a 
leaf. We wonderingly ask ourselves, Why is it that 
these days and nights have brought such beauty to 
us ? Is it because really the flowers are of deeper 
hue, the trees of fairer foliage, than elsewhere in our 
journeys ? Or is it because the hunger of the heart 
for human friendliness has, after all these days of 
wandering, found here at last a place where friend- 
ship could speak its kindly word, and loviug sympa- 
thy extend its tender offices ? After all, Nature in all 
her varied moods touches only the surface of our life. 
We wonder and we worship in her temples ; but there 
is no touch of sympathy in rock or wood, and we 
starve even in Nature's wonder-places for the human- 
ity that belongs to life and love. 

There is somewhere a legend of Ceylon that he 
who has once set foot upon its soil and leaves it, wan- 
ders through the world with a vague and melancholy 
discontent which cannot be appeased until he has re- 

12 



178 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

turned. We have no doubt that, until we reach kind 
friends again, we shall long with unutterable yearn- 
ing for this cosey cottage-room in the moonlight here 
beneath the vines, and have fair visions of the orange 
groves and cypress-shaded avenues of this fair colony. 
And in the coming days, when in the old home we 
have around us the old friends and the old loves, we 
are certain that we shall even then remember this 
oasis here on the desert's edge, and the new friend- 
ships formed beneath the orange leaves. 



ACROSS THE DESERT. 



What thy soul holds dear, imagine it 
To lie that way thou go*st. 

Shakspeare. 



CHAPTEE XI 

ACROSS THE DESERT. 

IT is three days' journey across the great southern 
Territories to Colorado. Friends at home pitied 
us when we told them of our route of travel, and 
wondered why we did not choose the central way in- 
stead of this path across the desert. But everybody 
went the middle way. We had heard of it and read 
of it, until we knew it all by heart, and we had desire 
to see the strange life of a less hackneyed region. 
We confess, too, that there was a fascination in the 
thought of going out by the northern pines, and re- 
turning by the way of the sunny South, with its 
orange groves and cactus flowers. 

The transition from Southern California to the 
desert is rapid. Under the San Bernardino range the 
orange-trees thrive, and there is the rich luxuriance 
which comes where the water flows. But when the 
zanjas stop, then begins the desert. 

Hardly is the old mission town of Bernardino out 
of sight before we pass into the great basin where, 
beyond tradition's memory, there was a vast lake. It 



182 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

is two hundred and fifty feet below the level of the 
sea, and the very hottest place upon the continent. It 
is a cold day when we pass through, the mercury hav- 
ing dropped from the boiling-point to the mildly tepid 
stage of one hundred and two degrees. Even this is 
reasonably sultry, although the brakemen tell us that 
on an average day they are obliged to wear gloves 
when they touch the brakes. We notice, however, 
that the natives here have the luxuriant iniasjination 
peculiar to the tropics ; and we do not literally accept 
all their alleged facts, although we do not deny their 
statement, that to this place their dead friends come 
back from Hades when they are frozen out. 

Passing through this tropic belt the way has many 
attractions. All the way across there are mountain 
ranges of rare beauty of outline, finely cut, with such 
sharp lines as we have never seen. They have no 
siQ:n of vesretation, but look as if the oreat lava sea 
had stiffened into rock. So deeply are they indented, 
that they appear to be filled with caverns, and, with 
the long plains before and the cloudless sky above, 
they are such things as we imagine the mountains of 
Moab must be. 

Towards the east the mountains soften into soil, 
with great sloping sides and little uplands lying plea- 
santly upon them. 

Crossing the Colorado Eiver we are in Arizona, 
" the treasure-chest " of the continent. The waters 



ACROSS THE DESERT. 183 

of the river are muddy, and there is faint trace here 
at Yuma of the wonders of scenery that lie along the 
course of its upper waters. The town is rude, made 
of adobe; every nationality is represented at the 
train, Mexican herders from the ranches, miners, 
prospectors, tourists. A band of vagrant Yuma In- 
dians are here, with splendid hair, but, oh ! with so 
little clothinsf on. 

The day is perfect as we speed across the Territory. 
The scenery is monotonous, of course, but having 
many attractions for one who has eyes to see. The 
cactus is everywhere, growing in broad-leaved branches 
or in great masses of spiky vegetation. The land 
towards the eastern border is richer, softer, greener. 
In the Gila valley it is even beautiful, for recent 
rains have brought the water for miles beside the 
track, brown and rich in color. So softly does the 
light rest on this, that the little wire upon the poles 
is reflected in it. 

Cattle are feeding now upon the plains, and be- 
tween our windows and the distant hills we see, from 
time to time, great wagon-trains moving with slow- 
paced oxen always toward the west. A rare mirage 
delights us. A lake, placid as the Eevelator's sea 
of glass, seems to lie there in the west ; and in the 
lake are islands, great, dome-like mounds, little sylvan 
spots floating on the waters, and larger masses, green 
with sloping fields, — 



184 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

"Sister isles, that seem to smile 
Together, like a happy family, 
Of beauty and of love." 

So real is it, that we cannot persuade ourselves that 
it is only a mirage, until after the vision passes. 

New Mexico has larger fertility than Arizona. 
Civilization has not yet reached its limit here. 
Sheriff Tucker, we learn, has killed eight men thus 
far in the season since the first of May, and seven- 
teen murders have taken place in Deming since that 
time. 

At one of the stations two prospectors take the 
cars. They have been out for months, riding in the 
saddle by day, sleeping under the stars by night, on 
the open plains; and they tell us of old Toltec cities 
toward the south, where, centuries ago, strange houses 
were built by a race now vanished, of great mounds 
filled with rude weapons and pottery of finer art than 
any living tribe has fashioned. There are few towns 
along the way ; but while the plains are desert-like 
with their neutral tints, beyond them are the great 
ranges, soft with hues of purple and golden mist. 

As we come north the towns begin to multiply, set 
in the midst of cotton-woods, green with the irrigating 
waters from the hills ; and now the natives point out 
the sites of old mines from which in other days large 
treasure was obtained. For centuries, after the rude 
fashion of those days, these mines were worked, then 



ACROSS THE DESERT. 185 

abandoned, until recent enterprise has opened them 
again, and, with larger capital, is bringing out abun- 
dant wealth. Here at San Marcial the battle of 
Valvercle was fought in 1862; at Socorro are the 
famous Torrence and Merritt mines ; and all the moun- 
tains here are showing richest prospects. Set here in 
the plains is the city of Albuquerque. It is only three 
years old, but it has ten thousand people, and boasts 
its electric lights and telephones. 

At Wallace we are on historic ground, for here in 
1693 Gen. Diego de Vargas made encampment with 
his army, and here the revolution against the crown 
ended, the rebellious Indians making submission to 
the king, having received the promise that they 
should no longer work wdthiii the mines, and that 
the covered shafts should not again be opened. 

At Los Cerrillos is the old Spanish Mina del Tierra, 
noted two hundred years ago as the richest mine upon 
the globe. It was worked by Indians, who climbed 
on a rude terrace-like causeway of notched poles, to 
the surface, bearing^ the ore in bas^s made of skins. 
Near this mine is one of the old chalchinti, or tur- 
quoise mines, from which part of the jewels of the 
Spanish crown were taken. The refusal of the In- 
dians to work in this mine led to a general revolu- 
tion, in which the Spaniards were defeated and driven 
from the country. 

At some of the stations we met the Pueblo In- 



186 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

dians ; they are a stupid set, not over-clean, ignorant 
of English, not over-modest in their dress. 

We visit Santa Fe, because everybody goes to this 
city. It is said to be rich ; if so, it is exceedingly 
modest in its display. It is old, if that is an 
advantage. It has public buildings, but they are in- 
significant ; some old churches, made of mud ; a few 
picturesque streets. But the adobe houses are at 
best poor things ; they do not satisfy the artistic 
sense, though they are regarded as a good card in 
this city, which makes merchandise of its antiquity. 
We could not keep from our mind the unclassical 
words of Finnegan's song, — 

" Our fathers had castles of mud, 

Of which they were fond of admiring ; 
They were huilt in the time of the flood. 
For to keep all our ancestors dry in." 

We are to leave the cars at an early hour in the 
morning, and are therefore in the common car. We 
are but few in number, and have made good arrange- 
ments for the nis^ht. But at Trinidad a chanQje comes 
over the spirit of our dreams, for the fire company of 
Pueblo enters, returning from a tournament in which 
it has been victorious. Each man bears a broom, 
and we are overwhelmed, as though an army of locusts 
had come. The average member of an ordinary hand- 
engine is not docility personified : a member of a 
Western company takes on new graces ; a Western 



ACROSS THE DESERT. 187 

company returning at midnight from a tournament 
bearing the champion's belt is some degrees more 
demoralizing than a Minnesota blizzard. Life be- 
comes a burden; it soon becomes an apprehension, 
for a reckless passenger in the forward car drawing 
his revolver calls down upon himself the wrath of 
the Pueblo heroes returning with victorious spoils. 
The man of arms is not a hero, and, retreating before 
the wrath he has inflamed, he comes to the ear we 
occupy, to bear there from time to time, with great 
abjectness, the revilings of the bullies he has roused 
but dares not silence. 

So escorted, we cross the boundaries of the Centen- 
nial State, and are soon domiciled in the pleasant 
villages beneath the snow-clad peaks of Colorado. 



A MEXICAN DETOUR. 



Shall we go see the relics of this town ? 

Shakspearb. 



CHAPTER XII. 
A MEXICAN DfcTOUR. 

CROSSING the Rio Grande, we feel at once the 
atmosphere of another and older empire. The 
Texan city of El Paso, on the northern side, is 
alive with the stir of enterprise ; but El Paso del 
Norte slumbers yet, feeling only slightly the com- 
ing in of the new life of commerce which is so soon 
to chano-e the old kinsrdom of Montezuma substan- 
tially into another American State. The horse-cars 
between the two cities bring us between narrow gar- 
den-walls covered witli thick traceries of vine to the 
depot of the Ferrocarril Central Mexicano. Dark- 
eyed boys stand idly here and brown-faced natives, 
while at the windows of the cars are not over-comely 
faces peering at each new arrival with that curiosity 
which belongs to the gentler sex. 

The day of revolutions is over, in Northern Mexico 
at least. The wild Apache's reign has passed, and 
nowhere is life more secure than alons^ the road 

o 

southward to the city of Chihuahua. Nevei'theless, 
the government compels the carrying of a guard of 



192 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

twenty native soldiers ; and here they come, — swar- 
thy, shambling, unsocial fellows, clad in loose sum- 
mer clothes, not over-jaunty in their style, and 
officered by a young lieutenant, ungracious and un- 
kempt, not out exactly at the elbows, but at other 
parts not less conspicuous. The road has been built 
by New England enterprise, a most generous subsidy 
being granted by the government. Massachusetts 
officers are in charge ; the pay-roll bears for the most 
part good old names familiar in the New England 
towns ; and if beyond the needs of the high officials 
there is a remnant left for the common holders of tlie 
stock, without a doubt they must carry their coupons 
to State Street to get their cash. 

Due south, two hundred and twenty-five miles, 
Chihuahua lies. For fifty miles the road passes over 
a vast sandy plain, unrelieved, save in the northern 
portion, where in the distance the Eio Grande is seen 
winding in the east amid the verdure created by its 
waters. The soil is dry, covered with a scanty growth 
of mesquite and cactus, and the cattle feeding here 
are of the wild and wiry kind. The Mexican steer 
has a not over-enviable reputation in our city streets, 
because of a somewhat excessive agility ; but in his 
native fields here along the track, he must be indeed 
an agile creature if he would find sufficient forage to 
keep him in condition. 

Soon the Candelarian Range looms up, great peaks 



A MEXICAN Dl^TOUR. 193 

of every curious form, softened by the pleasant haze 
of this delicious air, changing southward into round 
huttes and peaks, rising from the plains as fair as old 
Ascutney from its New England meadows ; and be- 
tween the hills are pleasant valleys, bringing down 
their soft verdure even to the desert's edge ; while over 
all the scene great cloud-masses begin to form and 
move, tinged at the closing of the day with rarest 
colorings. The cattle now nmltiply, for we are cross- 
ing the vast ranches of the cattle kings, and from 
these distant hills come down the streams that ferti- 
lize the plains ; no village is along the way, and slight 
sign of habitation, save the cottages of the ranchmen, 
with cattle corral set round with cotton-woods. Once 
we pass a little group of travelling natives taking their 
siesta in the shade of the station water-tank, the little 
burros feeding near, and such rare groupings of chil- 
dren and draperies of dress and coverings as an artist 
would have envied. 

Central Mexico, in its entire length, is a desert, 
save where irrigation has brought fertility. Along 
the coast, where there is the moisture of the sea, 
there is tropical luxuriance of growth ; but here it is 
treeless, almost verdureless, and were it not for the 
royal hills and the majestic clouds, our journey 
southward would be exceedingly monotonous. 

We have been journeying now over the great ranch 
of Governor Terrazas. At the little stations skilful 

13 



194 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

horsemen have given surprising exhibitions of their 
skill ; family groujDS have joined us, going to the city 
for the Sabbath fete; and the resplendent cowboy, 
armed like an arsenal, and covered with the costly 
sombrero, which, beyond wife or horse or even arms, 
is cherished as the one immediate jewel of the cow- 
boy's soul. The Mexican is not loquacious. Silent 
even with each other, we wonder if behind these dark 
eyes there is not just a hint of enmity at these pale- 
faced strangers who have come to change the empire 
of his fathers ? The mountains round the city are 
tinged with sunset colors as we reach our journey's 
end, the white walls are softened, and the great twin- 
towered temple, which is the glory of Chihuahua, 
stands in the midst, as though the city purposely had 
been built beneath its cathedral walls. 

Around the station the scene is marvellous in its 
details of life. Mexican carriages mingle with the 
latest-fashioned vehicles, men and women upon horse- 
back, children upon burros, the modern omnibus with 
its gaudy colors, Indians, natives, foreigners of every 
dialect, — all are here ; and every costume, from the 
half-clad Indian and Mexican with fringe and spur and 
sash, to the latest fashion from the States, — all min- 
gling here ; while on the hills the setting sun is kindling 
its evening fires, and beyond in the soft light sits be- 
tween the mountains the white city, like some old 
Moorish town. The old and new civilizations meet 



A MEXICAN DETOUR. 195 

here, — the adobe walls of the city and the iron rail- 
way of the North, the Indian, Spaniard, and the 
Anglo-Saxon ; just there beyond, the new car is be- 
ing put upon the tramway, while, moving onward to 
the city, march off with shambling gait the silent 
guard that has journeyed with us from the North. 

Upon the highest perch of the loftiest coach we 
ride into the city. How strange it is ! Women 
washing at the little stream beside the road ; curious 
streets, bounded with houses which seem to be but 
walls, and long lanes running hither ward, thitherward, 
with barracks for the soldiers, and little stores, some 
absolutely windowless ; quaint signs in Spanish above 
the doors ; dark eyes looking at us from latticed win- 
dows ; and in the streets women walking under the 
shadow of the walls, with Spanish lace deftly thrown 
above their shapely heads with that rare coquetry 
which has belonged to woman since Adam was born 
with eyes to see. 

We are at the Plaza now, and at the one American 
hotel the city has we find our quarters. Toward the 
street it is, like all these houses, most unpretentious. 
You enter through an archway an open court flagged 
with stone, and by a winding way come to a corridor 
running round this court. Here is the room that we 
shall have; windowless, save as the lattice of the 
door is window, with floor of stone, iron bedsteads, 
and just that tinge of color set off with blue that 



196 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

one sees in Northern Italy, among the lakes, in 
little hostelries and villa houses. We have no sort 
of S2:)ite against the easy-going landlord who carries 
on the house by proxy through his colored porter. 
We hope our duster fitted the husband of the cham- 
bermaid who kleptomanied it ; and when the rainy 
season comes, we trust the waiters' aprons will be put 
out to catch the drippings of the showers. We have 
an appetite not readily adjustable, we fear, to the 
Mexican style of living. The dishes are not always 
dried, and a kind of soap-sud flavor is carried over 
by them to the gravies of the succeeding meal, and 
there is slight over-use of garlic, and withal such 
a general over-doing of the meats and an under- 
doing of the fish, that we feel that somehow David 
Garrick must have been dining here when he said 
that "Heaven sends meat, but the devil sends 
cooks." 

The city of Chihuahua contains, perhaps, twenty 
thousand souls. It has an honorable history, for here 
Hidals^o was confined and executed, and the cathedral 
tower bears marks yet of the invasion of Maximilian. 
The streets are of generous width, swept clean in the 
early morning of every day with brooms of green 
willow boughs. The houses are of adobe, though 
some of the public buildings are of stone. The roofs 
are flat, and toward tlie street there is great mo- 
notony in these endless walls of garish stone ; and as 



A MEXICAN DJ^TOUR. 197 

one walks the streets in the early morning, before the 
life of the city stirs, he feels that he would die were 
he compelled to look for a single month on these 
long walls. There is one great street called the 
Alameda, running backward to the hills. Trees flour- 
ish, and seats of stone are beneath their branches. 
It is wide beyond all others. Here, on Sabbath days, 
the military band plays before the evening concert 
in the Plaza, and on great fete days the people gather 
to see the Virgin's image pass, borne on by priests. 
Market, City Hall, cathedral, gather around the Plaza, 
which is the heart of Chihuahua. To-morrow is the 
Sabbath, and there is a larger stir than usual in the 
market square. The market building is pierced by 
archways on every side, and entering in we see a 
strange scene. The Placita, or inner court, is open 
to the sky, and the full moon is struggling behind 
great clouds, throwing into ominous shadow these 
stranoje faces crouching^ above their little stores. 
Black eyes flash beneath broad sombrero brims ; on 
frail stands and barrels these tradesmen have their 
goods, and on the pavement, beside heaps of fruit, 
women sit, their faces strangely colored in these cross 
lights ; on the laps of weary mothers children sleep, 
while, unsolicited, lest the sleepers wake, the buyers 
pass up and down. 

In and out among them, threading our way over 
the withered fruits of these belated sellers, we gaze 



198 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and wonder at the weirdness of the scene, — these 
strange faces, draped in these Eembrandt shadows, 
the utter weariness which had come from many hours 
of watching, the flickering lights in rude lanterns, the 
strange fruits, the stranger language of passing buy- 
ers. The stock in trade is pitifully meagre, and those 
who buy take with them tiniest purchases ; for these 
people here have learned to make their necessities 
miserably few, and the city has no middle class, but 
only the rich and poor. 

The very weirdness of the place attracts us, and 
when, late at night, wearied with long journey ings 
in the streets, we come back to hear the music of 
the fountain's play within the Plaza, we are drawn 
again to the market-place close by. The group of sel- 
lers has thinned a little, for it is nearly midnight, and 
only now and then does some tardy housewife come 
for the morrow's store ; but still patiently sit these 
humble toilers. The shadows deepen in the paler 
light, while on the mother's lap sleep on the little 
ones, as happy as if the world would bring no care. 

The streets contain the people now, for it is a 
summer's night. Around the drinking-places are lit- 
tle groups of men, and at the archways house-wives 
are stopping for the gossip of the day; through 
the barred windows we see fair rooms hung round 
with pictures, and in not a few some signs of lux- 
ury; through the archways are visible the quiet 



A MEXICAN DETOUR. 199 

Placitas set round with flowers, while in the dewless 
air fathers play with children or friends gather for 
social joys. Hearing the sound of music, we listen 
beneath the window^s, and shabby though it is, so 
curious are we, we climb a little so that we can over- 
look the shutters and see within. A group of boys 
are gathered round a teacher, w^ho, with much vocif- 
eration and some angry words, if we can judge aright, 
is making rehearsal for the cathedral service of the 
morrow^ ; and very sweet, too, sound tliese youthful 
voices chanting the service of the Holy Church in 
the pleasant measures of the Spanish speech. 

As the evening^ changes into nio-ht, mothers are 
making beds before their doors for their little ones ; 
and so thick, as the night wears on, become these 
sleepers in the street, that we almost fear to walk 
among them, so angrily have the black eyes of those 
who guard them flashed at us. 

There is no more unfailing source of pleasure than 
to see a great city w^ake to life. But Chihuahua 
wakes not as other cities, with gradually increasing 
noise and stir. The cathedral bells call to early 
Mass, and we can hear the footsteps of the worship- 
pers without. From the corridor of the Placita the 
servant calls with drawling tones to the morning 
meal ; and while the fountain plays within the Plaza, 
and around it women are filling their w^ater-jars 
there is no other token that another day has come. 



200 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

We go up and clown the streets, sit beneath the 
branches of the Alameda, see the little burros coming 
in, bearing in panniers milk and comforts for the day, 
— not seldom bearing, too, great stalwart men urging 
on their beasts with peculiar never-ceasing shaking of 
the knees, as though the palsy were the epidemic of 
tlie nation. Great lines of burros bring wood upon 
their backs and sides ; most curious wood it is, — 
branches curled and twisted, gnarled into such knotty 
curvatures as if in tlie night some one had stripped 
the trees that Dore used to be so fond of picturing in 
his forests. 

We hope it is because of no morbid passion for 
sight of wretchedness, nor yet because of any antici- 
pating of our fate, that we have interest in the prison 
of the city ; but here we are at the iron gate, and on 
the wrong side of it are twenty fellows who would 
exchange places with us and make short dicker with 
the trade. The city is phenomenal in its order; while 
the police are such strange fellows, — so armed and 
girded witli weapons of every kind, so clumsy by 
reason of accoutrement, that a rogue of facetious tem- 
perament would surely die with laughter at his cap- 
tor; yet the city is in perfect order, and has bad 
eminence with the unruly classes. We find some 
Americans waiting here who tell sad tales of hard- 
ships. They are in prison through the failure of the 
authorities to rightly interpret some unfortunate cir- 



A MEXICAN DJ^TOUR. 201 

cumstances in which they were unhappily engaged ; 
they speak disparagingly of the Mexican character, 
and are not hearty in praise of the institutions of the 
Eepublic. Notwithstanding their apparent flesh, they 
are wasted, they assert, with insomnia because of the 
tarantulas which infest the cells; and if we will get 
them out, and in the mean time give them some 
tobacco, we shall be doing a favor to fellow-country- 
men who are temporarily in trouble. 

The Church of St. Francisco is the oldest church 
within the city. It is rude in architecture, and has 
no grace that it should be desired. The interior deco- 
rations are poor and tawdry ; the altar-rail painted 
green, the gates a little saggy at the hinges; the 
arch behind is veneered with carved wood placed in 
sections ; here are poorly painted panel pictures, all 
awry, an altar decorated like the playhouse of a child, 
tinsel flowers in china vases, and looking-glasses, 
with fire-screens behind tallow dips, and such utter 
childishness of ornament that one is saddened at the 
spectacle. There are most grotesque and hideous 
figures of the Saviour, with blood-stained, agonizing 
face, with all the repulsiveness of sufferiog, and none 
of the grandeur which some of the old masters used 
to show. 

The confessional is ruder than in any of the 
churches we have seen ; and here beside the altar in 
the Virgin's chapel is the repulsive bier, waiting for 



202 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

the burial of the dead. A mother and daughter are 
crooning here their prayers, keeping tally with their 
beads. From altar to altar they pass, kissing altar 
cloths and rails, and even the pavement of the floor, 
— the mother brusque and business-like, but the 
daughter inclined to linger, much freer with her 
glances at the strangers than seems consistent with 
the spirit of devotion. 

The Cathedral crowns the city. Go where you will, 
its towers always are in sight. Built nearly two hun- 
dred years ago by taxation of the Santa Eulalia Silver 
Mine, it is associated with the tenderest experiences 
of the people's life. It is of Moorish architecture; 
built of adobe, with towers faced with stone not un- 
like in color the Parisian buildino-s. The front is of 
most elaborate workmanship, with fluted pillars rising 
one above the other, with figures of the saints set in 
niches everywhere, the whole covered with delicate 
arabesques, like the fine chasings on a jewel; and 
flanking this fa9ade are massive towers, severely plain 
in their lower parts, that nothing may detract from the 
rich entrance-way which they enclose, but blossom- 
ing out above the gable of the facade into tapering 
spires set round with fluted pillars rising in marvellous 
symmetry to the shining crosses set against the sky. 

The walls are but poorly fashioned, having only 
such poor grace as art can fashion of adobe with 
slight mixture of rubble-stone, with bungling attempt 



A MEXICAN DETOUR. 203 

at beauty in flying buttresses upon the roof, and a 
heavy dome surmounted by an iron cross most sadly 
out of plumb. The eastern portal, however, is of 
surpassing beauty, — so rich in gentle traceries that 
one might fancy that a section of the old Alhambra 
had been transported here, with fair Corinthian pil- 
lars and imaged saints set round with beauty. The 
interior disappoints. The wooden timbers of the roof 
are sadly out of place, and there is lacking here the 
massiveness, the tender grace of the cathedrals of the 
older world; while the windows are set high, with no 
symmetry of form or richness of color. There is 
great poverty of decoration ; the altar is a faded thing, 
and even the vestments of the priests are common ; 
while the music, which is the soul of the service of 
the Church, is thin and strident, stirring no emotion. 
The High Mass of the Sabbath is in progress, and the 
vast edifice is filled with kneeling forms. 

The type of face is purely native ; here and there 
the clean-cut features of the Spaniard can be seen, 
and the darker shade of the native Indian ; but the 
Mexican face prevails, telling in the rugged lines that 
life here has been not wholly a thing of idle dreams. 
Miner, merchant, ranchmen from the hills, all are 
here, with curious costumes merging slowly into the 
Anglo-Saxon type that is to be the fashion of the 
world. There are but few fair faces in the multitude 
of women, although most cleverly have these cunning 



204 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

hands set tliera round with frame of gentle folds of 
shawl and scarf One face within the kneeling crowd 
attracts us, not by reason of its loveliness, but be- 
cause of its fair white color and such rapt ecstasy of 
worship as the pictures of the saints sometimes wear. 
The priest most famous in the city preaches, with 
such surprising eloquence that though we understand 
no word of Spanish we are greatly moved. 

As night comes on, the glory of the Plaza is re- 
vealed. The great cathedral towers stand sentinel 
above it in this rare moonlight, and from all the city 
streets the throngs are coming to keep the Sabbath 
fete around the fountain. The little hucksters are 
setting up their wares and lighting the lanterns of 
their stalls, and parents leading children come, and 
fair senoritas go round and round the Plaza's circle, 
while in the centre the military band plays with 
vigor if not with skill. It is said that in one of the 
Colorado churches there is posted this notice: "Please 
don't shoot the organist ; he is doing the best he can." 
We hardly think that this entreaty would save these 
fellows if these throngs had large sense of music; 
but the air is balmy, and in quiet converse, and such 
gentle fellowships as men and women make, the even- 
ing wears on till eleven o'clock, when the music stops, 
and no sign of life remains save the fountain playing 
in the light and the watchman making his weary 
rounds. 



A MEXICAN DETOUR. 205 

We seek in the earlier evening the one Protestant 
service of the city. It is not an easy thing to find a 
place in these streets which are so alike. The people 
backward from the larger stores are not versed in 
English speech, and so we try as best we can to tell 
our errand in such Spanish as we had learned in the 
visit of the day. We do not half succeed, we fear, 
for, following the direction which our question brings, 
we find ourselves at a hotel, which is not a church 
at all. We find the place at last, a preacher's home, 
but miss the hour of service. We are met in the 
Placita by a fair New Jersey girl, who loves to talk 
of this strange city and of the old home by the far 
Atlantic. In the midst of our pleasant converse a 
child's voice cries out, " Auntie, I want my pills ! " 
and we can but say, " We never saw before a boy that 
cried for pills ! " 

We have a long audience with the mayor, a gentle- 
man of most engaging speech and kindly ways. He 
tells us of the city, of the patriot Hidalgo, of the 
reign of law that had been brought into the city, of 
the grander life that is coming to the old nation with 
the progress of the railway and the coming in of new 
ideas. He has kindliest wishes for the Northern 
strangers who are changing the old into the new, but 
grieves that capital should so be squandered by reck- 
less men. " We have," he says, " worked our mines 
for ages. In rude fashion, if you please, but always to 



206 E AMBLES OVEELAND. 

advantage. Your people come ; our ways are wrong 
to them ; costly machinery is bought ; the old over- 
seers are unheeded, and men ignorant of our cus- 
toms and our people, ignorant of mining even, are 
put in charge^ wealth is squandered, and no profit 
comes." The government of the city is carefully ad- 
ministered ; the people are content ; the coming in of 
American capital has improved the condition of the 
laboring classes, and despite the excessive tariff the 
stores are filled with the products of American shops 
and looms. The men are reasonably well educated, 
while the condition of woman is degraded, in that she 
is regarded as the toy and drudge of man, rather than 
his companion. We see but little of the gallantry 
we supposed belonged to this people, and the sad 
faces which peer at us from beneath the soft folds of 
the little shawls which cover the heads with such 
consummate OTace still haunt us. The death of 
children under ten is esteemed not grievous, and for 
the dead of every age there is not that tenderness 
of memory, nor care to make beautiful the place of 
burial, which belongs to some other nations. The city 
still retains in the architecture of its streets, its plea- 
sant language, its laws and customs, the peculiar 
flavor of the past. Not in a day does a new civiliza- 
tion impose itself upon a people. But the strong, at 
last, make the laws and life of the weak ; and com- 
merce is to do for Mexico what the conquest of arms 



A MEXICAN DJ^TOUR. 207 

could not -do, — change the language and the very 
spirit of the people. 

As we turn our face northward, we rejoice that be- 
fore the transition comes which shall merge this peo- 
ple into the great Northern life, we have seen the city 
and felt the movement of the old life of ages. And 
so we leave behind the music of the Plaza's fountain, 
and the fair temple which holds aloft its splendid 
towers, like the brooding of an angel's wings, over the 
fair city of Chihuahua. 



COLORADO DAYS. 



14 



But on and wp, where Natureh heart 
Beats strong amid the hills. 

MiLNES. 



CHAPTEE XIII. 



COLORADO DAYS. 



THE gateway of Colorado is the city of Pueblo. 
Here the roads diverge, going northward to 
Denver, westward to the Gunnison Country and Salt 
Lake, with a line between extending to Leadville. 

We will first go Denver ward forty-five miles, stop- 
ping at Colorado Springs. The intervening space is 
unattractive; the land is bare, with few signs of 
either veojetable or human life. As we draw near 
our destination in the West, a great line of mountains 
stands against the sky, culminating in the towering 
summit of Pike's Peak. It is hard to conceive of 
any mountains such as these being without beauty, 
but this great wall of stone is seamed and scarred 
with such grand lines, there is such massiveness of 
outline, rock and forest so cleverly intermingle, that 
even the first view fascinates and enchants. What 
Interlaken is to the Jung Frau, such is Colorado 
Springs to Pike's Peak. Seated upon the plateau on 
which the town rests, we are at just the proper focal 
distance, — a little near, perhaps, but not too far to 



212 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

catch the grace of the intervening meadow and the 
beauty of the little valleys that run among the hills. 
This Colorado sky is something wonderful, — deep, 
rich, magnificent. The colors of field and mountain 
are strangely brilliant ; and nowhere on the continent 
have we found a place where, with larger content, we 
could sit all through the summer days and watch the 
sun and clouds paint their pictures on the everlasting 
hills. 

Shrewd enterprise laid the foundation of Colorado 
Springs. The town is a model of thrift and beauty ; 
streets of metropolitan dimensions, public buildings 
of taste, private homes placed in the midst of gar- 
dens, while the purest water carries health through 
all the town. 

To the world Colorado Springs contains the attrac- 
tions of this region, and there is no great attempt on 
the part of the natives of the place to undeceive. 
But beyond the view, and the beauty of a thrifty 
village, there is nothing here. Even the springs, 
from which the town is named, are five miles away, 
at Manitou. From this smaller place the trail leads 
to the summit of Pike's Peak, while around the 
quiet village nestle such beauties as decorate few 
places in any land. But alas for Manitou ! the 
steam-presses of the newspapers are at the preten- 
tious town yonder across the valley, and the stran- 
gers disembark at the latter place and stay, until, 



COLOKADO DAYS. 213 

visiting the lovely village five miles away, they give 
their hearts to Manitou. And it is incomparable in 
beauty. A quiet little spot dropped among the hills, 
with pleasant roads, and winding lovers' paths beside 
the singing stream, with cottages vine-embowered, 
pleasant hillside homes, and such romantic roads lead- 
ing to wonder-places, that one could spend a summer 
here and not exhaust the charm of this fair Manitou. 

Even now it seems to us as a pleasant summer's 
dream, for heaven and earth seem to kiss each other 
here. And how shall we describe a dream ? Or 
where shall we begin to tell of the beauties of a per- 
fect picture, or put in words the rhythm of a matchless 
poem ? and Manitou is dream, picture, poem, all in 
one, the loveliest spot that nestles anywhere among 
the fairest valleys of the continent. 

The town is a tiny thing. A few hotels, the vil- 
lage houses not obtrusive, summer cottages nestling 
beside the river and on the hills, little colonies of 
tents where the campers are, the Casino, with its 
pleasant architecture, the winding road beside the 
river, and over all the majestic mountains, — this is 
Manitou ; and yet this is not all, for there is a name- 
less witchery that eludes description, an atmosphere 
which words cannot picture, a subtle grace that 
baffles speech. Was there ever such royal afternoon 
as this on which we start to make exploration of the 
beauties that are here ? 



214 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

The stables of tlie village shelter no finer, fleeter 
horse than this we ride, for, with the utmost courtesy 
that we can use, we search and find the softest spot 
in the owner's heart ; and does he not know by the 
look within our eyes that we have loyal love for a 
noble horse ? And so we shall have this royal fellow 
to bear us on our way. 

To the Garden of the Gods first. 

The stableman tells, with minute directions, just 
where the wonders are. This stone from such a point 
is Mrs. Grundy ; that, a monk ; the other, some pecu- 
liar wonder, we know not what. 

There is but little doubt that the fantastic stones 
do assume the shapes described, and that, by a happy 
exercise of faith and vision, one can see strange forms 
in this museum of nature. There is little doubt, too, 
that the average tourist is so intent on finding these 
monstrosities, that he misses the grandeur and glory 
of the place. We have seen so much seeking of the 
infinitely little in the midst of the infinitely great, 
that we are in chronic revolt against the simply 
curious; we have come to abominate freaks of na- 
ture, and so we will not even look for a single resem- 
blance in rock or cliff. 

We do not wonder that writers visiting this place, 
beguiled by the emphasis placed upon its fantastic 
freaks, should have missed somewhat the larger 
beauty of the Garden of the Gods. It is a wonder- 



COLORADO DAYS. 215 

place, not in freaks and fantastic carvings, but in the 
great red peaks that guard its entrance ; in its 'superb 
coloring of rock and cliff; the pleasant vales of ver- 
dure ; the gigantic sculpturings ; and over all the 
majestic glory of Pike's Peak, throned like a monarch 
above the hill and plain. 

In the upper part of this strange valley, through 
a rustic gateway, we enter fair Glen Eerie. The hills 
bound it in on either side; and, following up a little 
stream broken into bits of beauty by a thousand tiny 
falls, we come into the very heart of the hills. How 
beautiful and majestic, too, are these rounded sum- 
mits, these beetling crags, these fair slopes garnitured 
with flowers and foliage ! It is the very holy of 
holies of the hills ; and surely Nature has lavished 
here the utmost riches of her skill! 

But along the way there is beauty, too ; for the 
road winds like a serpent's trail, the branches are 
interbraided in leafy canopies above our heads, and 
rare traceries of vines, crimsoned with such glory as 
the autumn brings, garland the forest trees ; by the 
brookside and in little bits of meadow brilliant flow- 
ers grow, tinted with the barbaric color that wildness 
loves, while in the tiny places where the winding of 
the brook has made a tongue of land, kindly art has 
planted flowers fenced round with curious stones like 
grotto walls. So through such leafy arch as we have 
never seen, with flowers broidering the way, we wind 



216 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

in and out among the beauties of fair Glen Eerie, 
wondering how in this far-off region, which only a 
little time ago was an undiscovered land, nature and 
art have so wondrously wrought to make among the 
hills one of the earth's loveliest places. While the 
lights and shadows weave royal tapestries upon our 
path, canopied with foliage, we commune in delight- 
ful silence with the spirit of Glen Eerie, with noth- 
ing to break the spell of its enchantment save the 
tread of our horses' feet, and the low, sweet music of 
the running stream. Backward to the town, through 
it and beyond, we ride on and up into the rugged 
wildness of the old Ute Pass. Had we the finer vision, 
we might, dismounting, find perhaps the old tracks of 
the Ute warriors who used to pass this way. We 
should surely find traces of the pioneers who, in the 
delirious days of gold, came here to find fortune in 
the gulches of the hills, and from our saddle we 
can now see the ruts worn by the supply trains of 
the great camps beyond among the mountains, — for 
this is the Leadville trail ; and, while our panting 
steed stands here above the gorge, we hear the tink- 
ling bell of the long wagon- trains climbing by this 
rugged way to their destination among the summits. 
It is a wild, desolate path, — hewn out of the moun- 
tain's side, with black overhanging crags, and torrent 
foaming far below; with graceful falls, and long, 
sloping, foamy rapids ; with curious windings where 



COLOEADO DAYS. 217 

the hills have indentations ; with little caverns into 
which we can drive our horses and let them drink out 
of the mountain's heart. There are also great steep 
pitches of rugged hill running out in little plateaus, 
as though the road desired resting place, that it might 
breathe before entering upon another climb. 

We must come down the valley to the village, 
cross the little stream before we enter upon the deep 
defile of William's Caiion. It is very narrow, hardly 
more than a trail, though carriages come here by keep- 
ing cleverly within the ruts. The cliffs are magnifi- 
cent; five hundred feet upward they carry their 
Titanic sculp turings in solitary peaks and pinnacles, 
superbly colored, moss-stained, weather-marked. Had 
fair Manitou no other thino: than this, it would still 
have pre-eminence; but this is only one of many 
wonders, and even here there are stranger things than 
this defile of rock. There on the face of the cliff, 
hundreds of feet above the road, is a little opening 
into the mountain. A narrow path leads to it, and 
with weariness we will climb to this " Cave of the 
Winds." Was there ever such wonder as this perched 
so high towards heaven ? One, two, many hundred 
feet we go into the cliff, to find fantastic halls and 
banquet chambers, miniature temples with Gothic 
arches and fair Corinthian pillars, bridal bowers with 
couches twined with acanthus leaves, grottoes shaped 
as the hiding-place of nymphs, and such rare fashion- 



218 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

ings of stalactites as Nature sometimes makes when 
she has centuries of solitude and darkness in which 
to toil. 

We have come across the continent to climb Pike's 
Peak, and here the old mountain stands looking in 
our window at little Manitou all through the night. 

We rendezvous in a central place at seven o'clock. 
A single guide will go with the party, which numbers 
twelve or more. We have selected the day before 
the largest horse the stable has ; and when we start, 
in the pleasant gallop to the Iron Spring at w^hich 
the trail begins, we find that we have made good 
selection. The inevitable ladies follow on ; timid, of 
course, but full of that high ambition which belongs 
to those who have never climbed twelve miles toward 
heaven on a mountain's side. Before the first mile is 
finished we have left them far behind, thinking per- 
haps that it will be good manners to go on ahead and 
see that due arrangements are made for their recep- 
tion on the summit. The path is a narrow one, but 
of entrancing beauty. Through groves and fields, on 
mountain sides, above great precipices, over noisy 
streams, beside cataract and fall, the path winds on 
and up. Little glades and glens are passed; rare 
forest vistas open, long reaches of serpentine paths 
through tangled grass, fords and meadow roads, rocky 
trails on lower summits, along the flanks of foothills ; 
for five hours our brave, strong horses bear us to the 



COLOEADO DAYS. 219 

glory that is on the peak. Meantime the world 
below seeks to keep us loyal to the beauty that we 
have left. Whenever we look down and back, new 
wonders are unfolded. Manitou is lovelier now than 
ever; the Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, the 
far-extended rolling fields, are at our feet, while 
all around us are the mountains, — Alps on Alps, — 
crowned by the fair summit towards which we climb 
through all the hours. 

But our gallant horse has an ambitious rival at his 
heels, — a large roan beast, who has more than once, 
we know by his impatience, led the train of horses 
to the summit. He is bearing a huge, good-natured 
Irishman, who owns a forge in Cincinnati, — one 
Patrick Buckley, — a clever-witted fellow, who has 
rare love of nature, and has travelled much about the 
earth. 

Long ago have we left the slower horses behind, 
and now the genial Pat and the writer go on together. 
For two good hours at least we are regaled with such 
dissertation as Pat can give on "the manly art." 
Next to love of nature, this fellow has love of fighting. 
We even think he has had a turn or two within the 
ring himself ; at any rate, he has the record of every 
pugilist, and talks of Heenan, Sullivan " the Slugger " 
(whoever he may be), " Tug Wilson," and all the gal- 
lant crew of bruisers ; giving us such insight into 
arts of fighting, the rules and regulations of the ring, 



220 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

pools, bets, Marquis of Queensbury rules, and spar- 
ring bouts, as we have never had before, — though 
Pat can hardly understand how one seemingly so 
intelligent should have lived so long and learned so 
little. Meantime we are rising to the summit ; 
among the rocks violets are growing, and such rare 
golden flow^ers as we have seldom seen in the valleys 
that are farther from the sun. The great billowy 
mountains of the West are below us now, and the 
entire State is spread like a map beneath us. The 
air is growing thin. The horses breathe with labor ; 
there are bands like steel tightening around our heads, 
and the landscape below is strangely changing in our 
vision. But we are on the summit now, — a vast 
field of bowlders, desolate, weird, majestic in its vast 
altitude above the world. 

How far can the vision go ? We know not, we 
care not ! What are these peaks eastward, north- 
ward ? What ranges these, what valleys those ? We 
will not ask, we will not be told. Why should we 
break this splendid picture into fragments, analyze 
it into names, dissect glory from glory ? The moun- 
tains will not lie fairer in the sun because we know 
the names that belittle them, nor w^ill the ranges add 
one hue to these golden lines by our knowing what 
camp or city lies beneath them ; the scene shall be 
unbroken, undesecrated, — an eternal picture hung 
on memory's walls. 



COLORADO DAYS. 221 

Fifteen thousand feet we are standing now above 
the level of the sea. It is not wonderful that we 
can breathe only with effort ; our heads are bursting 
with severest pains, our lungs heave violently, we 
stagger as we walk, and only by utmost strain of 
will can we rouse ourselves to see the glory we have 
climbed to get. 

It is a four hours' journey down to little Manitou 
from the summit. But our pugilistic Pat dares us to 
follow him, if we can. We will not boast, but we 
will try. 

And so we go down in the wildest race we ever 
made before. The charm of mountain travel is in the 
descent, but it must be a flight rather than a march. 
The muscles must be relieved from tension, the hands 
free to catch trees and twigs, and then in great adven- 
turous strides one must go down as the wind goes. 
Every sense must be alert, eye must not falter, mus- 
cles must not fail, the joints must be loyal, and then 
with a springy, spongy path, with an accomplished 
tramper to lead or follow, what is there on earth much 
better than a flight from a mountain's summit to the 
plains ? But never before have we made such flight 
on a horse's back ! The road is perilous in places ; 
many times in the ascent did we wonder what would 
become of us if our horse should make misstep, for 
half the time we are on narrow trails above precipice 
and chasm, on frail paths built up of timber, rock, 



222 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

and sand, with narrow causeways and ways so peril- 
ous that, on the upward way, climbing with slow, 
cautious pace, we had need for cool eye and steady 
hand. This is the path which for twelve miles we are 
to follow, led by this wild Irish wag. "We accept the 
challenge, and Pat leads on. Shall we ever forget that 
ride ? Down the steeper pitches we can only descend 
with caution. Miles downward from the summit we 
must wind among the rocks with slow, painful effort ; 
but when once in the forest, with mad, wild racings, 
we come down like the wind. Swaying with the quick 
turnings of the path, half staggering often with sud- 
denly diverging trail, sliding down steep descents of 
ledge and earth, galloping over level spaces and de- 
scending paths alike, so we come down as never men 
came before that day. Somehow there is intoxica- 
tion in this mountain air. How otherwise could we 
come with laughter and mad, swift racings over these 
dizzy paths, where, hours ago, we walked with trem- 
bling ; and by what spirit are we possessed that we 
dare gallop around cliff and bowlder, over narrow 
bridge, alons the mountain's side, where one false 
step will impale horse and rider on the trees two 
hundred feet below ? But oh, it is a rare, rich ride 1 
Not since the old days has the blood run so swiftly 
in us, nor since boyhood has there been such exultant 
life as now, when, with every faculty alive, set firm 
in stirrup, with every nerve of this stalwart horse 



COLORADO DAYS. 223 

quivering responsive to our touch, we come down 
behind this wild John Gilpin, who would outrun us 
if he only could. 

Men wonder as we pass them in the village, and 
ask if we have really made the journey to the sum- 
mit ; and even Pat himself, while giving honest praise 
that he could not defeat us, is surprised to find that 
in two hours and seventeen minutes we have made 
the twelve-mile journey, saying nothing of the stop 
— we will not say how long — outside the town, to 
let the horses make themselves presentable. 

Seventy-five miles northward now to Denver, the 
marvel city of the West. We cannot believe that 
only a few years ago it was a desert here, for there 
are few cities so fair as this. Wise men have laid 
out this city here : streets of generous width, public 
buildings of imposing size, private homes of elegance ; 
while from every part of the great place loom up the 
superb mountain range running one hundred miles 
or more, with its matchless crest of snow. 

We cannot explore all the wonders of this great 
State, for already the invisible ties that run out from 
heart to heart begin to draw us back to the old home. 
We will do the next best thing, and come up here 
in Jackson's Gallery, and let him show us, in the per- 
fect pictures that this wizard of the camera has made, 
the glories of the West. So the panorama passes be- 
fore our vision, — gorges, peaks, mountains, parks. 



224 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

everything that Nature has, every wonder, every 
glory, from sea to sea, caught on the lenses of this 
artist's camera, and made by his patient skill into 
such rare pictures as nowhere in the East have we 
ever seen. 

Going southward now, we will make the journey 
by night to the Gunnison country, far west, coming 
back by day and noting the marvels that lie along 
the way. The city of Gunnison is new, brusque, 
brisk, large with expectations. Eich mines are in 
the mountains ; and unless the natives lie, — and it 
is possible they do, — this is to be the richest region 
in the State. 

Leaving the city, coming East, the train bears us 
straight toward the heart of the hills. The Eocky 
Mountains are directly in our path, and we are to 
cross their summit and run with the rivers to the 
sea. One, two, three engines are put on, — stumpy, 
determined, unsocial things, with no jewelry of 
brass or tinsel, but small- wheeled fellows, that will 
hug the old mountain with tenacious grip, and crawl 
over it despite its ruggedness. It is a steep task, 
however, this mountain climb of five thousand feet. 
When, in twenty years, we shall come this way 
again with the wings which every traveller will carry 
then, we shall make this summit in just eight miles ; 
but now we will zigzag up for thirty miles. The 
road winds not much as yet, but more and more. 



COLORADO DAYS. 225 

following the indentations of every valley, skirting 
precipices, balancing on the side of deep defiles, run- 
ning around great points of rock, yet clambering in 
great spirals to the clouds. The tandem-harnessed 
horses ahead are pulling valiantly, but they do not 
hurry much. The air is getting thin, perhaps, for 
they are breathing hard, as we panted w^hen, a month 
or more ago, we climbed Mount Washburn with our 
packs. The snow-sheds begin to multiply, great 
ranges come in view, behind us the road winds like 
a ribbon below among the trees, and beyond it goes 
on and on in curious loops and windings, breaking 
the summit into terraces. Suddenly we stop in the 
darkness of a vast shed. There is ominous sense of 
danger. The air is thick with smoke ; men go out, 
loiter upon the steps, go forward but return not, and 
wonder changes to apprehension. Soon we learn that, 
with such rude tenderness as men can use, a crushed 
and mangled workman has been put upon the train, 
injured in the tunnel just where we stopped in the 
darkness. He was a laborer upon a construction train 
moving on the siding. A projecting timber crushed 
his limbs, and left him maimed and helpless. 

But we are on the summit now, and the links are 
parted. There, a mile below, roll on the little en- 
gines, beckoning us to overtake them if we can. We 
are on the Atlantic Slope, and the afternoon light is 
making strange shadows in the valleys; and how 

15 



226 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

silently the great peaks lie here midway between the 
seas below the pomp of moving clouds ! 

Into the Eoyal Gorge of the Arkansas we now 
come. The walls rise three thousand feet, cut into 
curious forms, fine of line, delicate of color, running 
up in places with almost invisible traceries, and near 
by knotted into rough masses as though a molten sea 
had stiffened into stone. There are openings, too, 
worn smooth with the melting snows, and here are 
little tributaries bringing down perpetual streams. 
Eare surprises of cave and cleft are on these walls, 
strange channels leading upward to the clouds, old 
weather scars, and great mosaics of colored rock, 
with little fringes of fern and grass wherever on shelf 
of rock there is lodgment for the soil. 

Once there flashes at us the verdure of an upward 
winding valley, soft and green, as sometimes in a 
nightmare's desolations there will be a glimpse of 
beauty ; and then the crags go on, the shadows deepen, 
and in great walls, so high that vision almost fails, 
towers the mass of stone, not beautiful nor wonderful, 
but simply appalling in majestic awfulness. 

So we come back again to Pueblo, and at midnight, 
fast asleep, we are borne eastward, bearing in our 
dreams pleasant memories of our Colorado days. 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 



So comes a reckoning when the banquet *s o^er, 
The dreadful reckoning ; and men smile no more. 

John Gay. 



CHAPTEE XIV. 

INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 

AEOUND trip across the continent in these 
prosaic days is not prolific in adventures. 
The wild Indian, in harmless fashion, eats his ra- 
tions on the reservation, and Jesse James has gone 
where the wicked cease from troubling, and even 
the stage robber is at rest. The only personage who 
can interject an element of peril into a continental 
trip is the unrom antic cowboy, and there is no abso- 
lute certainty that a traveller may be on just the par- 
ticular train which he " goes through." 

We are sorry that we are not able to give to our 
readers picturesque descriptions of startling perils 
and heroic instances of personal courage, but in most 
aggravating security we make our journey, and return 
home in a state of mortifying safety. But we are 
not yet home. 

Out of the great chasms, leaving behind moun- 
tain, gorge, and mine, we come eastward. The fair 
fields of Kansas and Missouri pass in panorama be- 
fore us ; the Mississippi is crossed, and here we are 



230 RAMBLES OYEELAND. 

again at Chicago, safe and sound. Eeclining in the 
easy-cliairs with which these enterprising Western 
roads are furnished, we have time to look around 
and note the curious life that may be seen even on a 
railway car. The porter, who responds so readily to 
the name of John, that we think he must have been 
christened by it, is in serious trouble all the way. His 
special function in the world is to keep the way pas- 
sengers from entering the car. But John's power of 
resistance is limited, and the amount of personal push 
and self-assertion developed in these Kansas females 
is phenomenal. The sable guardian of the through 
passengers is in a state of chronic altercation, ex- 
postulating, remonstrating, threatening, and coaxing, 
quoting general orders and specific rules, but liable 
to be overcome by the energetic women, who, though 
they are riding only between the flag stations, wish 
to go in as great comfort as the railway company pro- 
vides for any of its patrons. 

A little Massachusetts school-marm, who is going ' 
down the road not more than forty miles, comes 
bouncing in with a perfect avalanche of such bun- 
dles as the average woman likes to carry. John ad- 
vances and guards the passage, but by sheer audacity 
of speech she overcomes him, and, forcing a passage 
in, takes a seat behind us, enjoying her journey with 
the calmest possible serenity. She is utterly obliv- 
ious of the fact that she is a voluble little fraud, and 



INCIDENTS OF TEAVEL. 231 

that the blushing gentleman on whose chair her not 
over-dainty feet recline, as well as John, who scowls 
behind her, know it. 

The commercial- traveller genus abounds in these 
Western States. On the platform of stations where 
not a house nor store is visible, there is the omni- 
present drummer; at lonely water-tanks he screens 
his head from the noon-day heat beneath the cis- 
tern, while he waits for the train ; at flag stations 
he is waving flag or lantern ; and go where we may, 
we hear his hearty laugh and see his good-natured 
face. We ourselves are even taken for one of the 
fraternity, and in entering the Colorado City, which 
bears with us the burden of a not-over comely name, 
a shabby two-dollar hotel is commended to us, be- 
cause it has a good samjjle room and a first-class bar. 
In several years of travel we have never seen before 
this day one of these self-reliant fellows seriously 
annoyed at the ills of life. But now a new experi- 
ence comes. In the seat just ahead is an ideal speci- 
men of the fraternity. He is arrayed in wonderful 
expanse of linen, and has that air of proprietorship 
which belongs to the average over-fed young man. 
The atmosphere of general omniscience about the 
fellow awes us ; we sit and admire the soft folds of 
his pulpy neck, really envying his rare capacity for 
looking wise. The conductor . reaches him in the 
progress of his rounds, and is handed the ticket by 



232 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

the young man with effusive condescension. The 
official calmly says, " You are on the wrong train." 

Language fails to describe the " breaking up " of 
that drummer ; the revelation that he is not omnisci- 
ent, the utter collapse of dignity, the coming down to 
the ordinary level of a common, erring, human nature, 
the descent from the high stilts of his self-conceit of 
that fat young man, was such a sight as was worth 
a trip across the continent to see. 

We are soon to pass a train returning to Kansas 
City, and the young man can transfer himself to that 
and go back his twenty miles. Like the old philoso- 
pher, whatever concerns the race is of interest to us, 
and so we go to the back stairs of the train to see 
him make the connection. The trains approach, pass, 
but neither stops. When twenty rods apart they 
halt, and the fellow launches himself, with his sam- 
ples. The mercury is warming to its work among 
the nineties, and it is not easy for a fat man, with 
half a dozen conscienceless passengers watching, and 
a box of samples in his hand, to make fast time upon 
the ties of a railway track. We encourage him with 
mirthful words, make suggestions as to styles of 
locomotion ; but, despite this help, he fails, for when 
within arm's length of the train the white rings 
rise above the engine and the cars move off; and 
alone upon the track, with samples dropped and 
pulpy fists shaking east and west at the retreating 



\ 

INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 233 

trains, we leave him with his meditations and his 
samples. 

The traveller across the continent still meets with 
many curious types of life, although the facilities of 
travel are fast destroying individual characteristics of 
costume, speech, and manners. Even in the Terri- 
tories, frontier life shows the effect of contact with 
the refinements of the world. There are innumerable 
comedies, however, on a railway train. 

One of our companions finds in the emigrant car a 
dejected man, who so arouses his sympathy that he 
makes a canvass of the passengers for help. Every 
eye is busy with the scenery along the road, and, 
rather than see his mission absolutely fail, the sym- 
pathetic solicitor from his own pocket makes gener- 
ous contribution to the sufferer. But the turning of 
the contents of the hat into the man's lap works a 
transformation; he is now gayest of the gay, cele- 
brating his good fortune with potations from some 
bottle drawn from unseen hiding-place, singing sense- 
less songs, and so overwhelming with gratitude the 
mortified victim of his cunning arts, that our friend 
w^ould have surely killed the fellow if he only dared. 

On the ISTorthern Pacific a juvenile tramp comes on 
the train. The conductor warns him to leave at the 
next station, threatening all sorts of mutilation if he 
should be found on board after the nearest depot is 
passed. No sooner does the official leave the car, 



234 KAMBLES OVERLAND. 

however, than the stalwart brakeman takes the boy, 
and in the most miscellaneous fashion possible throws 
him into the liuge wood-box in the corner. There all 
day the fellow rides, lifting the cover from time to 
time and looking at the passengers without one hint 
of humor on his dirty face, although we confidently 
believed that never did the little vagrant feast so 
royally as on that eventful day. 

On the Pacific steamer we are just an hour too late 
to secure a state-room, and so are placed in a kind of 
pantry on the second floor down, just above the screw. 
As we entered our sarcophagus, just before the hour 
of sailing, we found in the upper berth the shaggiest- 
looking specimen we had ever seen. His head was 
bald upon the top, but grown over in the rear with 
utmost profusion of hair. Snarled and tangled curls 
and ringlets, — matted, braided, mixed together in 
such hairy jungle as we had never seen upon a human 
head ! Where the hair left off the beard commenced, 
— a kind of terra-cotta shade, much faded by the sun. 
He was a kind of polychromatic man ; for his clothes 
were sea-green, with an outside ulster in a poor com- 
bination of black and tan. 

We supposed, as we saw him lying there upon the 
upper shelf, that he was some old mummy, in transit 
to a San Francisco museum ; for he looked for all the 
world like one of those not over-handsome relics of 
the past. 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 235 

When in the early morning he began to unwind 
himself, preliminary to getting down and out, we had 
an apprehension that the last day had come, and that 
sea and land were giving up their dead ; for we were 
feeling a little sea-sick, and did n't care whether the 
universe wound up or not. As, from beneath our 
blankets, we saw our room-mate make his hasty toilet, 
the thought passed through our mind that when this 
mummy was alive he was, unless his looks deceived, a 
first-class bandit ; and when he asked us for our 
comb, we presented it as we should all the assets that 
we had, if only his demand had specified those things. 
We tried to ask forgiveness for such sins as we could 
remember, with the headache that we had, and won- 
dered by what process he would kill us when he 
should have pulled out the few remaining teeth of 
our relic of a comb. However, one cannot always 
tell by appearances what men are, in the Great West. 
The framework of our comb came back to us. The 
steward was even sought by him and sent to us ; and 
before the voyage was over we found this man. the 
most companionable of fellows, — genial, witty, wise ; 
a graduate of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, and 
now a physician practising in some region, to us un- 
known, between Puget Sound and the North Pole. 

The cowboys are often with us, — a trifle loud in 
manner, with a little flavor of brag and bluster, armed 
like travelling arsenals, but withal harmless, — not 



236 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

even terrifying, except to the women who have come 
from the Atlantic coast. 

The peanut fiend, like the drum-beat of England, 
goes round the world. We had hoped that we should 
get beyond the bounds of his jurisdiction ; but he is 
ubiquitous, — the same irrepressible, inopportune, 
voluble specimen of importunity in the Territories 
as in the old centres. In Arizona Ave found him 
selling, as native products of the soil, the same shell 
porte-monnaies that had been tendered us in every 
State along the way. Corn as hard as Montana agates 
was offered us as " fresh popped." Novels in green 
and gold, of the Mrs. Southworth order, were shed 
upon just and unjust alike; and "Peck's Bad Boy" 
followed us from sea to sea. 

We think it must have been through observation 
of the newsboys on the trip across the continent that 
Joseph Cook discovered his theory of the "persist- 
ence of evil ; " for these pests are simply incorrigible, 
and if one in desperation throws them from the train, 
at the next station there will be a new relay come 
to take up the vacant basket and carry on the work 
of w^orrying the martyrs. 

There are all sorts of travellers, — good natured, ill 
natured, inquisitive, and reticent ; people who make 
the best of everything, and those who take the most 
of everything. An old Scotchwoman rode beside us 
through three hundred miles of the finest scenery on 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 237 

the continent, and never raised her eyes from the 
knitting-needles that she held. She had travelled 
through Europe and Australia in the same fashion, 
and though she had seen but little, she had filled her 
trunk half full of the stockings she had made. 

Every tourist across the continent is certain to con- 
tract the time-table fever somewhere on the trip. It 
is a species of mania, and usually lasts about three or 
four days, though we saw several cases where it had 
become chronic. It usually commences in a study of 
the guide-book, and is attended in its milder forms 
with getting off at the various stations, questionings of 
brakemen and conductors, with interviews with local 
travellers, which become more persistent as the fever 
increases in intensity. Then the " map-stage " of the 
disease comes on ; distance tables are studied, and 
folders of connecting roads, the patient trying to 
harmonize the figures on the time-table with the 
actual running time. There is a kind of fascination 
in the task that lures one on. Plans are made for 
days and weeks ahead, and once the mania comes on, 
there is no effectual resistance until the victim is 
exhausted, or the tables thrown away by solicitous 
friends. We saw a lamentable case of the disease in 
New Mexico. At Santa Fe an unsuspicious man 
came on the train ; a departing passenger carelessly 
left a time-table upon the seat, and the gentleman, all 
unconscious of the peril of the act, took it up and 



238 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

began to study out its ingenious puzzles. Gradually 
the subtle fascinations of the folder began to weave 
themselves over him ; the noon-day meal was hastily 
swallowed that he might resume his work ; day deep- 
ened into night, and still he puzzled, ciphered, and 
tried to solve the riddle of the modern Sphinx. We 
sank to sleep; the poor time-table victim, studying 
still, was the last object on which our vision rested ; 
and when roused at midnight, at a junction of the 
roads, by the exodus of a portion of the passengers, 
we saw on an omnibus top the pitiable sight of the 
poor victim still studying, in such light as the moon 
could give, the unsolved and unsolvable riddle. 

We had never but once before this trip rode 
through a night without taking a sleeping car. Com- 
ing across the Arizona desert, however, we venture the 
experiment. It is not a success. Such turnings and 
twistings, such repeated attempts to make a five-foot- 
eight man straighten out on a five-foot seat, such 
complete ignominious failures, we had never experi- 
enced before in all the misadventures of a checkered 
life. We never had much talent in figures. If we 
were summoned in college, at times, before the faculty, 
it was not to receive the annual prizes in mathema- 
tics ; but we learn on that moonlight night upon the 
desert more of the disciplinary science than we had 
ever dreamed of in our undergraduate days. We 
learned that man is not, geometrically considered, a 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 239 

right-angled, triangied kind of a figure ; that he can- 
not successfully be the base and perpendicular of a 
triangle at the same time ; though we gave, in the con- 
tortions of our body, a most perfect object-lesson of 
the spiral of Archimedes. We took up the cushions 
and half rebuilt the car ; we constructed " L's," wings, 
and additions, with carpet bags and blankets ; we 
tried high pillow made of overcoat and low pillow 
made of duster ; but we worked out the problem to a 
demonstration, that a full-sized man cannot sleep in 
the seat of a railway car without building either the 
car or the man on a different model. 

We are persuaded by the experiences of the sum- 
mer's trip that the most pestilent nuisance to-day in 
the world of travellers is the man who snores. Pleas- 
ant men, men apparently kind-hearted, Christians by 
day, with the coming on of darkness are transformed 
into fiends. We had heard snorers in the East with- 
out great discomfort, although we have some peculiar 
theories of what we would do with the mildest of 
them, if only we had autocratic power. But there is 
a malignancy in the snoring of these Western fellows 
that " murders sleep ; " it is a kind of interjectional 
snoring, that rasps the nerves and makes one wild. 
For a time there is a sort of guttural cadence ; the 
sound grows fainter and fainter, and you think that 
the end is near ; then the music stops, a faint gasp 
follows, and the hope that springs eternal in the hu- 



240 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

man breast says, " Thank heaven, he is dead at last ! " 
But no, with a series of convulsions, sobs, gasps, and 
groans, the monster comes back to life, to play over, 
with endless variations, the same tragedy, until the 
heart is sick with hope of death deferred. We kicked 
the elbow of a man half across the State of Missouri, 
quite as much out of kindness to fellow-passengers 
as for personal revenge ; but it only served to change 
the snorer's tune, to pull out extra stops in this hu- 
man organ, and bring down upon ourselves fresh 
varieties of inharmonious sound. It is said there is 
no way to cure these fellows except by death. We 
have spent many wakeful hours during our summer's 
trip in speculations as to whether, if one should kill a 
snorer, it would be accounted murder. We would be 
willing to risk the verdict, if only we could have a 
hand in making up the jury. 

We saw the neatest punishment administered to an 
obtrusive drummer that ever before came beneath our 
notice. A pair of young and prepossessing ladies 
came upon the cars at midnight at a station in New 
Mexico. We were to change in the early morning, 
and were riding in the ordinary car. The drummer 
sat behind the fair young ladies, and was more than 
kind in his attentions. They did not seem to like it, 
but hardly knew how to be free from him. One of 
the ladies was a mother, and had in her arms her in- 
fant child. 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 241 

The young man had evidently been somewhat about 
the world, and knew that the easiest way into the 
mother'^ heart was through the baby; and so he 
played and toyed wdth it, snapped his fingers, wound 
and unwound his stem-winder, and engaged in the 
various devices that gain the sympathies of a con- 
fidincr infant. In a moment of for<:^etfulness he asked 
to take the cliild, when the mother passed it over ; 
and the great fellow, in such awkward fashion as 
men have, dandled and fondled it. It was very pretty 
and very nice for a time ; but a very little of a baby 
goes a long way with an ordinary man, and it was 
evident tliat after a few moments the infant began to 
be a drug upon the drunmier's hands. 

Meantime, the mother and her sister, in the seat 
beyond, have fallen fast asleep, and tlie obtrusive 
young man is left alone with a lively baby on his 
hands to care for as he can. It was a lonesome and 
a long night for the drummer, for the passengers were 
profuse in sympatliy ; and whenever the ba1)y showed 
signs of sleep, some officious neighbor would slip 
over and wind the cliild up for another half-hour of 
wakefulness. At length the situation became so se- 
vere that the drummer gathered boxes and bundles, 
and, miles away from his destined stopping-place, 
left the train, throwing the baby in the mother's lap. 
The w^oman woke, took the child, but as she looked 
at the drummer's seat, we judged by the twinkle in 

16 



242 RAMBLES OVERLAND. 

her eye that this was not her first journey awa}^ from 
home, and that she carried the baby, perliaps, as a 
weapon with which to guard the fair sister who sat 
beside her. 

There are touching incidents, too, along the way. 
More than once mourners come on board and ride 
beside us, while the precious dead are carried, to the 
burial-place, in the car beyond. The conductor who 
was on the train last night going up the branch is 
with us now as we come back ; but another performs 
his duty, for he is eastward-bound to see once more, 
if possible, the dying father to whose bedside he was 
summoned in the night. 

For half a day we ride beside an anxious wife, 
hastening to join her husband, who was shot yester- 
day in a quarrel up the line ; and in the speech with 
which sorrow finds relief we see, in the long journey 
of the summer, that no spot upon the earth gives 
immunity from human suffering. 

Now that we are getting homeward, we may give 
some practical hints about a trip across the con- 
tinent. 

Save for the associations of Europe, — which mean 
much to cultivated people, and little to others, — a 
trip to San Francisco and return gives as great enjoy- 
ment as a tour to the Old World. In natural scenery, 
Europe has nothing to be compared to the Yellow- 
stone Park and the Yosemite. Southern California 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 243 

is fairer than Italy in climate, and its peer in vegeta- 
tion; Mexico can be visited with slight expense of 
time and money, and Colorado is a museum of won- 
ders. As regards expense, one can make the round 
trip across the continent at about the expense of a 
visit to Eome. For seven or eight liuudied dollars 
one can go wath great comfort ; and a less amount 
will suffice if one will exercise reasonable prudence. 
The hotels might be worse : the roads are admirably 
equipped and well managed. We consider the ideal 
route is the one which we have described in this 
book, — out by the way of the ISTorthern Pacific, re- 
turning by the Southern Pacific. From Colorado 
one needs to go west through the Grand Canon of 
the Arkansas and over the Marshall Pass; and a slight 
continuance of the journey takes one to the preten- 
tious humbug of Salt Lake City, which is about all 
there is on tlie Central line to the Pacific. During 
the past summer the long stage-ride over the Pocky 
Mountains, and the non-completion of the railroad to 
the Yellowstone Park, would have made this trip 
difficult for any except those of robust strength ; 
but now the roads are completed, and by another 
summer all conveniences of travel will be estab- 
lished. 

The weather is perfect in the summer months, and 
during our entire journey neither gossamer nor um- 
brella were used. Ordinary clothing will suffice ; and 



244 EAMBLES OVERLAND. 

a small hand-satcliel will contain all necessary con- 
veniences. 

Expense of travel is somewhat higher than in the 
East; but with increase of patronage and competi- 
tion this will be greatly lessened. Travelling is as 
safe as in auy^part of the country for one who has 
ordinary cammon sense, and is the fortunate owner 
of a civil tongue ; while inevitable discomforts may 
be reduced to the minimum by a wise disposition to 
make the best of everything and have a good time. 

Eastward now, we are on the home stretch. Chi- 
cago is behind us, and through the fair Canadian 
fields we will hasten as fast as wheels can carry us. 
Now we halt beside the fair St. Lawrence, where the 
Thousand Islands float upon the currents of this, the 
queenliest river that flows in either continent to 
the sea. Danube, Khine, and Hudson deserve the 
praises sung of them ; but none of these so worthily 
might receive the tribute of the poet's song as this 
grand stream bearing onward its mighty burden. 

Not yet has the poet's pen told the wondrous grace 
of these fair islands here, the little lake set in an 
island's heart, the balmy days when summer's heat 
is tempered by the flowing stream, the matchless 
nights, when the moon works its transformation 
scenes. 

The way homeward now is short ; the grain ripens 
in the Mohawk's valley, and along the Hudson's bank 



INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL. 245 

tbe foliage catches the color of the autumn days. 
From the metropolis of the Pacific we have come to 
the larger city on the Atlantic's waters, and our sum- 
mei-'s flight from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden 
Gate and back is over, and we are home again. 



UniTersity Press : John Wilson and Son, Cambridga 



Ik^l^ 




